Hi!

Pittsburgh Cocoaheads tonight will feature Sean McCune talking about Git, the groovy distributed revision control system thingie.

7:30 on the CMU campus.

Cheers,
++md

James Summers has posted a very thoughtful review of Learn Objective-C on the Mac.

The redoubtable AnneKate™ tagged me with a narcissitic brain-dump meme, How I Got Started Programming, so I figured I’d chime in. Usually I don’t do that stuff here, but hey, it’s my blog, I can me me me me if I want to.

How old were you when you started programming?

Sixth grade. Which would put me around 12 years old maybe? My dad brought home an Apple ][ (amazing how many stories like this start off with that machine), intending to do Typical Computer Things like track finances and write simulations of radiation-resistent DNA (my Dad's awesome), but I noticed that it could play GAMES, and I glommed on to it. Dad got occasional visitation rights, but for the most part, the machine was all mine.

It was a super spiffy version, too. It had 48K, plus Applesoft BASIC on a card (Integer BASIC on the motherboard). To switch between languages, you powered-down, flipped the switch, and powered back up. (this was before DOS 3.3). Eventually the machine got a Language Card (16K expansion).

How did you get started in programming?

Typing in programs from magazines and books. This was the time when print publications (remember those?) would have complete program listings. I learn best by by eye -> hands -> screen -> eye -> brain, and this is how I learned programming. Actually, where I learned debugging, since you learn more by making (and finding, and fixing) misteaks than you do by doing things perfectly the first time. At least that's what I keep telling myself.

What was your first language?

Apple ][ Integer BASIC. Later Applesoft, and then the UCSD Pascal system.

What was the first real program you wrote?

Where "real" is something non-trivial, and not something I typed in from a magazine. It was one my Dad designed, and I implemented. It was essentially a quality assurance database system for a Radiology department. Diagnoses could be entered, and then later correlated with reports from Pathology. Or something like that. As far as I was concerned, it was "type stuff in, save it to disk", and then periodically run the worlds most inefficient multi-device sort. But it was cool seeing three Disk ][ units hooked up to a machine, all running.

It was at this time I learned what flowcharts were (remember those?), sigma notation, and basic algorithms and data structures.

What languages have you used since you started programming?

Roughly chronoillogical order, favorites starred

Integer BASIC (*), AppleSoft BASIC (*), UCSD Pascal (*), FORTRAN IV (under UCSD Pascal), VAX FORTRAN, VAX assembly, VAX BASIC, VMS DCL, Dbase ///, Turbo BASIC, Mac/TML Pascal (*), Hypertalk, Object Pascal, C (*), C++, Newtonscript, /bin/sh, /bin/csh, emacs lisp, Tcl (*), Perl, Oracle SQL, PL/SQL, PHP, Objective-C (*), /bin/bash, Javascript, Pythong, Java, Sawzall. HTML (XML and generic SGML) if you count those as langauges.

Badgers, or Wombats?

Badgers, definitely.

What was your first professional programming gig?

Visix Software (R.I.P.) We did a cross-platform toolkit called “Galaxy”. It ruled™, and was definitely ahead of its time. Its geometry management system has not been approached by anything I’ve seen since.

I started off in tech support answering questions about network configuration for our license server and X11 Font Paths for our Looking Glass product. Eventually worked my way up to Señor Software Engineer working on some important parts of the product. Also, because of Visix, I spent four months on Wall Street.

My first “will program for food” was a couple of summers and Christmas vacations during college at the Little Rock VA Hospital, assembling PC-clones from spare parts, and building some software tools for the department. One was an elaboration of the previous medical system (this time in a “real” database, Dbase ///), and an isotope tracking system. I couldn’t really be paid, so I was officially a volunteer. If I was there for four or more hours, I got a cafeteria meal voucher, which was *just enough* for a cheeseburger, onion rings, and a coke. It was the only non-lethal thing there.

If you knew then what you know now, would you have started programming?

Hell yes! I’m having the time of my life, and I get paid for it.

If there is one thing you learned along the way that you would tell new developers, what would it be?

This is more generic life advice, but something I feel strongly about: Surround yourself with people that are smarter and more talented than you, and learn from them. See what they do, figure out why they do it. Ask questions. Bask in their greatness and absorb everything.

At Visix, I spent a big chunk of time hours and three whiteboards going through the Galaxy “Class Manager”, figuring out how it worked (which was a combination of C++-style vtables and Objective-C runtime lookup, but all in vanilla C, with a lot of macro magic).

What’s the most fun you’ve ever had programming?

At Visix, in the bootstrap days of Galaxy. I wrote a lot of demo programs and sample code, in addition to doing the “List Manager” (think Excel, but without the calculation engine). There were a lot of times I’d be working all night on some fun thing (like a graphics demo that needed scrolling, but we didn’t have scroll bars implemented yet, so I wrote a little joystick thingie). My favorite times were hacking on something fun, looking out the window, and watching the sun rise. It was magical.

Thanks AnneKate, that was a fun stroll down memory lane. Now get off my lawn.

Next CoocaHeads/Pittsburgh is Thursday July 3, 2008, 7:30 at Newell Simon Hall 3001 on the CMU campus. No set agenda, but we’ll have the usual snacks and geeky discourse.

P.S. I’m on twitter as “borkware”, still working on revisions to AMOSXP, plus doing some work on LoC.

In case folks might have missed it : Launchd: One Program to Rule Them All Tech Talk @ Google, with Dave Zarzycki, the launchd dude.

Hello Everyone,

Two friends of mine who are excellent musicians (Trumpet and Trombone) are moving to Philly this summer, and they’re looking for good community music groups (band and/or orchestra). They don’t know anyone in Philly. *I* don’t know anyone in Philly would know what groups are good in the region. If anyone has suggestions, leave a comment or drop me a line at markd@borkware.com. Thanks!

Hello everyone,

The next Pittsburgh CocoaHeads will be April 24, 7:30 pm at Newell Simon Hall, room 3000. Unless someone wants to talk about something else, I’ll babble incoherently about Unit Testing and Code Coverage, plus a peek at the Google Mac Playground and CoverStory.

We’ve got a google group / mailing list at http://groups.google.com/group/cocoaheads-pittsburgh. Please join if you’re in the area.

During a discussion on Cocoa memory management on Cocoa-Dev, Bill Cheeseman posted the patent numbers for the autorelease mechanism. Here are some links, all called “Transparent local and distributed memory management” :
5,687,370, 6,026,415, and 6,304,884.

The Time Capsule I ordered a while ago has arrived. Woot! Remote Backup Nirvana is coming my way!

So far, it’s been working out “eh”. It took a couple of tries to get it onto my WDS network, and I’ve gone through a number of scram-the-backups-and-redo-from-scratch getting things set up. Here are a couple of first impressions.

• Enjoy the UI glitches, like this one that asks for a username but there’s no place to put it.
• Mail.app is *not* your friend. I had a large number of deleted messages that were getting stated on every backup. I’d need to backup a few megs, which would take two minutes, and then it would sit at “Backed up 10Megs of 10Megs” for 5-10 minutes, all of which was looking at mail messages. It turns out I had a lot (over 65,000) of “deleted” messages that weren’t in the trash, weren’t in any mailbox, but showed up if you command-L while viewing the inbox. Control-clicking on the mailbox and choosing “Erase deleted messages” did nothing. I had to select each Inbox (I have 3) and choose “Erase Deleted Messages in Selected Mailbox” from the menu (or use command-K) Once I did this, a backup (including an email check) is about two minutes from “Backup now” til it completes.
• If you have encrypted disk images where you store your pornographic re-enactments of the Smurf saga sensitive financial data, you’ll want to use the Sparse Bundle format, which will only back up bands of data that have changed, vs the entire disk image.
• Anyone with the Time Capsule disk password can see all the backed up data. Unfortunately, you have to supply this password (or an account password) when choosing a disk, so someone can look in their keychain and get it. So best to put your Smurf porn sensitive financial data on those Sparse Bundle disk images.
• I haven’t figured out the best way to back up the backup. There’s not (to my ability to find) a way to limit a particular backup set to a given size, like “only back up 300 gigs so I can fit it onto this laptop drive in an enclosure and stick in the bank lock-box”. There is an “Archive the Time Capsule disk to another USB disk” which might be useful, but I had hoped to be able to back up to smaller-profile disks.
• I’ve had some “could not mount backup” situations after sleeping the machine in the middle of a big incremental backup (I had done serious violence to my Mail.app message directory tracking down the issues I described earlier). I’ve also had this happen when ejecting the TC disk during an initial backup. No warning, it immediately ejected, and then would not re-mount. I had to delete the sparsebundle file on the Time Capsule and re-do my backup from ground-zero. So if you’re time-capsuling a laptop that you may want to shut down on a moment’s notice, even if it’s in the middle of a backup, run some tests before committing to it to make sure this won’t happen to you.
• Also, which is even more fun, is that spotlight has decided to index my time capsule backup volume. Before it decided to do this, backups were ~2 minutes for a no-op. Now they’re back up to 6-10 minutes, with mdworker going bonkers in fs_usage until I eject the Time Capsule backup volume (which usually auto-ejects once the backup is done) I can’t add the backup volume to the spotlight opt-out list:
  

  And mdutil -i off /Volumes/blah doesn’t turn it off either. Even a reboot didn’t help. Sigh.

Hopefully once some of these annoyances are worked out I think Time Capsule will work out a lot better in backing up my, and the wife’s, MacBooks. Before this we had an “rsync to a DL-DVD-sized dmg on a Mac mini” setup, and hoped it didn’t fill up the disk image, plus waiting for a DL disk to burn, and hope it didn’t fail part-way through with media errors.

Just in case you’re reading Learn Objective-C on the Macintosh, and you’re wanting to make a “Foundation Command-Line Utility” project in the might (or might not) be new Xcode which might (or might not) be associated with the latest iPhone excitement, you’ll probably want to look under “Command Line Utility” on the sidebar, and choose “Foundation Tool” from the project picker. They may (or may not) have moved it from previous Xcode versions. Or not. You didn’t hear it from me,