From the no-man’s-land of the format wars

Posted on 2008-02-08 by Graham Lee

About nine and a half years ago, a sixteen-year-old gadget boy in Weymouth made a simple mistake. Given the already near-complete shift of the music industry from the cassette tape to the Philips compact disc, and the superior portability and resilience of the Sony MiniDisc format, this boy decided that it was obvious the world was going to adopt this format. So our protagonist went out and bought a MZ-R35 walkman. Three years later, and although the writing was by now on the wall for the storage format, he added an MD-M3 to his collection.

I now believe I own all five pre-recorded MiniDisc albums ever made (though I don’t remember when I bought Hours by Bowie, and can only think that I bought Recurring Dream because at the time I fancied a girl who liked Crowded House), and have swathes of my vinyl and tape collection "backed up" to recordable MDs. But the rest of the world forgot to catch up with me! Where are the Hi-MD drives built in to laptops? Even Sony don’t offer that… Come to that, why do we still put up with crappy scratchable CDs? iPods may be a damn sight more convenient than my MD walkman is, but the bandwidth of an amazon package containing MiniDiscs is still far higher than the connection between my laptop and iTunes.

I still intend to find the required cable and port the rest of my LPs to the format though, as MDs are definitely more portable and resilient than is vinyl. And I haven’t actually listened to Bauhaus’ 1979-1983 in years.

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We! Haven’t! Thought! This! Through!

Posted on 2008-02-01 by Graham Lee

So almost the entire world has exploded with news that Microsoft haven’t bought Yahoo!, but are at least waving ridiculous amounts of TEH CAHS under the noses of the shareholders. But what would be the outcome of such a takeover? Microsoft and Yahoo! are in pretty much the same position, they both have technologically acceptable “online presence” services which are marketed really badly such that a competitor virtually owns the market. The only example of a service between them I can think of which is vaguely market-leading is Flickr, although Yahoo! Groups (which was eGroups) might still be popular, I expect that Facebook and Google groups are at least comparable, if not larger than it. Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail are both familiar names, but then online mail is now a free and worthless commodity, and everyone has been playing catchup with Gmail for the last couple of years. People don’t “Windows Live Search” a thing, they “Google” it. People don’t “Yahoo! Video” their dogs on skateboards, they “Youtube” them.

So the post-acquisition world would go from two implementations to one, but one that’s still being marketed into the ground and with a few fewer workers. And all the transitional pain that Microsoft will impose on Yahoo! services, when someone remembers that FreeBSD isn’t a Microsoft solution. M$ seem to be of the opinion that with a market they don’t lead and $45Bn, the best approach is to lose the $45Bn and hire some other people who don’t lead the market. Not, like, take that $45Bn and make their stuff better.

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Permissions whee!

Posted on 2008-01-26 by Graham Lee

As in any good mystery, the question is who done it? MacNN reports a flaw in Tiger, Leopard in which an authenticated copy operation gives the destination files (the copies) the ownership of the logged-in user, not of the name they used to authenticate. The question is, which user did the copy?

Let’s say there’s a system with Alice Administrator and Richard Regular-User. Richard downloads a new application from the intarwebs, and wants to put it in /Applications (though why? Why can’t he just put it in ~/Applications like a good little user? Never mind). The thing is, he doesn’t have the right to do that. Finder presents him with an authentication dialogue, and no matter how many times he enters his username and password correctly, he can’t acquire that right. However, he sees Alice walking past in the corridor and asks her to enter her admin credentials. For whatever reason, she agrees – now Alice has authenticated and Alice has acquired the right to copy the files. So even though Richard requested the copy, it was actually Alice who performed it. Therefore Alice created the files at the destination, so they should be owned by Alice.

The only thing which muddies the waters (and leads to the conflict of convenience vs. security which is described in that article) is that in many, or indeed most, cases on OS X where this will arise, Alice and Richard are actually the same person – Sammy the Single (Security-conscious, hence separating their use of the system into regular and admin accounts) User. It’s a convenience that as Richard wanted the files copied, Richard now owns the copy – but this defeats the point of Richard existing, which is that Sammy doesn’t want to be able to change /Applications without being warned.

Interestingly the same question doesn’t get asked of the sudo command – it’s clear that if I type sudo ditto Foobar.app /Applications/Foobar.app it’s the super-user who does the work.

Posted in FTFF, security | 1 Comment

Side-by-side

Posted on 2008-01-24 by Graham Lee

A frequently-heard rider on the statement that Mac OS X "is more secure than Windows" is that fewer people are prodding its weak spots, because it has fewer users. Well, Windows Vista has a market share comparative to Mac OS X (all versions), and this report describes the security statistics as being somewhat comparable, too. So there we go.

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How to solve every problem in Cocoa

Posted on 2008-01-23 by Graham Lee

Yes, really, every problem. Don’t think of Cocoa as "simple things simple, complex things possible" (actually, was it Cocoapenextstepsody or Perl who started with that tagline? Or someone else? I digress) but "simple things simple, complex things simple but you’re looking at it wrong". With Objective-C 2.0 (particularly properties), Core Data, Cocoa Bindings and Cocoa Scripting, almost every "it doesn’t work" moment comes down to getting something wrong with KVC or with KVO – either observing the wrong key, or typoing a method name such that you aren’t KVC-compliant for a key you need to be, getting validation wrong or unexpectedly going down the -setNilValueForKey: path. So do yourself a favour:

#define GLInstanceMethodEntryLog(format, ...) NSLog(@"-[%@(%p) %@] entry: %@", NSStringFromClass([self class]), self, NSStringFromSelector(_cmd), [NSString stringWithFormat: format, ##VA_ARGS])

Now because all of the retain count bugs disappeared when you turned the garbage collector on, the remaining issues are with that bit of code the PHBs are paying for ;-)

Posted in cocoa, gnustep, objc | 1 Comment

Project: Autonomous Revolutionary Goldfish

Posted on 2008-01-18 by Graham Lee

I was going to write, am still going to write, about how silly project names get bandied about in the software industry. But in researching this post (sorry blogosphere, I’ve let you down) I found that the Software-generated Gannt chart was patented by Fujitsu in the US in 1998, which to me just explains everything that is wrong with the way the US patent system is applied to software. For reference, Microsoft Project was written in 1987 (although is not strictly prior art for the patent. Project does everything in its power to prevent the user from creating a Gannt chart, in my experience).

Anyway, why is it that people care more about the fact that they’re going to be using Leopard, Longhorn, Cairo, Barcelona or Niagara than about what any one of those is? As discussed in [1], naming software projects (though really I’m talking about projects in the general sense of collections of tasks in order to complete a particular goal) in the same way you might name your pet leads to an unhealthy psychological attachment to the project, causing it to develop its own (perceived) personality and vitality which can cause the project to continue long after it ought to have been killed. For every Cheetah, there’s a Star Trek that didn’t quite make it. And why should open source projects like Firefox or Ubuntu GNU/Linux need "code names" if their innards are supposed to be on public display?

I’ve decided that I know best, of course. My opinion is that, despite what people may say about project names being convenient shorthand to assist discussion, naming your project in an obtuse way splits us into the two groups which humanity adores: those of us who know, and those of you who don’t. The circumstance I use to justify this is simple: if project names are mnemonics, why aren’t the projects named in a mnemonic fashion? In what way does Rhapsody describe "port of OPENSTEP/Mach to PowerPC with the Platinum look and feel"? Such cultish behaviour of course leads directly to the point made in the citation; because we don’t want to be the people in the know of something not worth knowing, we tend to keep our dubiously-named workflow in existence for far longer than could be dispassionately justified.

Of course, if I told you the name of the project I’m working on, you wouldn’t have any idea what I’m working on ;-).

[1]Pulling the Plug: Software Project Management and the Problem of Project Escalation, Mark Keil. MIS Quarterly, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Dec., 1995), pp. 421-447

Posted in Business, metadev, mythicalmanmonth | Leave a comment

Objective-C Design Patterns

Posted on 2007-12-08 by Graham Lee

Certain events at work have turned me into a bit of a design patterns geek of late, and as such I stumbled across this DDJ article from 1997 (the title of this post is the link). According to del.icio.us not many other people have stumbled across it, but it’s a great article. The code listing links seem to 404 even though the listings are at the bottom of page 1 of the article.

Something very important can be learned from this article, which is at best covered tangentially in the GoF book: Design patterns are not language-independent. Calling the C++ and Objective-C ways of writing code "pattern idioms" ignores the point that actually, the code you come up with is more important than the design (customers don’t typically want to pay the same cash for your UML diagrams that they do for your executables), and gasp different languages require different code! Different patterns can be used in ObjC and Smalltalk than in C++, and different patterns again in object-oriented Perl. Different patterns will be appropriate for working with Foundation than with the NeXTSTEP (pre 4.0) foundation kit or with ICPak101. Designing your solution independent of the language and framework you’re going to use will get you a solution, but will not necessarily produce the easiest solution to maintain, the most efficient solution or one that makes any sense to an expert in the realm of that language and framework.

Posted in cocoa, gnustep, objc, ooa/d | Leave a comment

FSF membership

Posted on 2007-12-04 by Graham Lee

I am now an associate member of the FSF. This is a good way to support Free Software development (including GNUstep, and you don’t even need to be able to code :-). I’ve added a referral link to the sidebar – I don’t get a kickback obviously, although I do get gifts if enough people are referred by me, and it helps the FSF to track where donors are getting their information from. If you use Free Software, you might consider donating some cash – especially now that the dollar’s so crap ;-).

Posted in Business, fsf, GNU, gnustep | 1 Comment

Post #100!

Posted on 2007-11-23 by Graham Lee

And to celebrate, we look at the differences between managers and humansprogrammers.

Posted in Business, mythicalmanmonth | Leave a comment

Upcoming Cocoa nerd stuff

Posted on 2007-11-22 by Graham Lee

I have organised a NSCoder Night for this coming Tuesday, November 27. It shall be in the Jericho Tavern pub at 8pm; bring yourself, bring an interest in Cocoa, and perhaps bring some code to talk about or work on. There won’t be any agenda as such, just a group of NSCoders talking about NSCoding.

In January, PaulHR and I shall be entertaining OxMUG on the subject of Getting Things Done�™ – in particular I have now started braindumping my many to-do lists into OmniFocus and I’m finding it very expressive and useful. In fact preparing that talk has just zoomed its way over to my OF inbox :-). That talk shall be Tuesday, January 8th.

Posted in cocoa, gtd, nscoder, omnifocus, oxmug | 1 Comment