Archive for August, 2005

John has some pictures of our trip to Downieville: smugmug – John Foss : Downieville, July 17, 2005. I’m the guy not wearing a shirt with a blue helmet.

John Foss put some pictures he took of me on his smugmug site:

Hurt arm – I hugged a tree. (from riding in Auburn)

Doing Trials riding (at Jess’s house):

Like many people, I have several computers at work that I frequently switch among:

I recently started using Synergy to share my mouse, keyboard and pasteboard among my main work G5 and my home Powerbook. It is pretty cool, and fairly easy to setup. Once I pop into work, I run a little script to start the client on my PowerBook:

#!/bin/sh
prog=(/Users/corbin/synergy/synergyc neeb.apple.com)

### Start the new client
exec “${prog[@]}”

I set this to be always opened with Console, and I manually double click on it when I want to start the synergy client.

Read the documentation for the exact way to set it up..once you have it running, it is very cool!

Last weekend at Ken Adelman’s house, I got to see five of the gorgeous cats from Leopards, Etc.

It was really really really cool! I like wild cats, and it was great to see them up close and personal. The best part was hearing the cheeta purr!

I highly reccomend going to one of their events. You will not be sorry!

You can utilize some of Xcode’s cool features to become a faster Mac OS X programmer. Here are some things which you may not know:

1. Use Code Completion (Code Sense). However, the default keyboard shortcut is lame. Go to the Xcode preferences, Key Bindings:

and change the Code Sense Completion List binding to be Ctrl-Space (I use Option-Space, but really it is the ctrl-key, because I like to swap my ctrl and option keys):

While you are there, set the Code Sense Select Next Placeholder to be Ctrl-/ (that is control forward slash, and again, I have mine set to be option-/ because I swap my keys):

2. Now that you have it properly setup, use it! Here is how you should be using it:

You want to call a particular method in your current class (self). Type the first few characters:

Hit Ctrl-Space to bring up the Code Sense window:

Type a few more characters to narrow down what you want, and arrow key down to select the signature you want to use:

Hit enter to add the template into your source code:

Fill in the first parameter:

Then, hit Ctrl-/ to go the next completion item and highlight it:

Repeat with more Ctrl-/ commands until you are done.

3. Congratulations! You are now a faster programmer.

–corbin

It seems that a lot of people don’t know how cmd click works in a lot of Mac OS X Cocoa applications. To put it simply, Cmd-clicking on a non key window (or application for that matter) will act like a normal click without making the window key! This is really cool for testing UI things while debugging or testing for memory leaks.

Here is how I use this technique while debugging:
1. I’m debugging my application with Xcode. Inside of Xcode I have a “hot” breakpoint that I don’t want to enable, since enabling it will make Xcode key, and the key/focus switching will hit the breakpoint at the wrong time.
2. Because of this, I keep my application key, and Cmd-click on the title bar in Xcode to move the window to where I can see the breakpoint.
3. Then, I Cmd-click the breakpoint, enabling it without setting the window key and never leaving focus from my application that i want to debug.
4. Now, I perform the operation that invokes the breakpoint and debug away.

Sure, you could do this by figuring out how many times the breakpoint was hit, and in gdb ignore the breakpoint for X times, but sometimes that is a pain to do.

I also use this technique while trying to find memory leaks with Object Alloc. Frequently, focus switching causes numerous allocations, and by Cmd-clicking the “Mark” button in Object Alloc I can prevent those allocations from happening.

Note that cmd click doesn’t work 100% correctly with certain components. For instance, NSTableView won’t change the selected item unless it is key (note that that bug will be fixed).

–corbin