Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

Readers of this weblog may have been wondering about the mysterious weblogging hiatus I mentioned awhile ago. One or two of you have even asked me about it, and I have to admit I’ve been a bit evasive. Well, I’m happy to say that the terrible secret can now be revealed: since coming back from WWDC, I have been preoccupied with a series of interviews for a position at Apple Computer.

Fortunately, the experience was worth its attendant stress (once, I was so nervous I briefly forgot the word “category“—I kept having to talk about “those constructs that you can use to add methods to an existing Objective-C class without actually subclassing” until the word suddenly popped back into my head) and I received an offer. So, long story short, starting August 18th, I will be getting my sushi from Apple’s cafeteria (oh—that, and working on software update integration).

What does this mean to you? Well, that depends on who you are:

• If you’re a reader of my weblog, you will probably be treated to fewer of my opinions about Apple. Which, honestly, is probably a good thing, since it only means I’ll be able to concentrate on publishing more useful things: technical information, sample code, cautionary accounts of my disastrous travels, and so forth.

  On the other hand, it will also mean the loss of my unique voice as a Colorado weblogger, after I become assimilated into the teeming mass of Bay Area geekdom. But at least I’ll be able to react to Silicon Valley as a stranger in a strange land, which might make for some decent content.

• If you’re a PodWorks user…uh…stay tuned. Right now, the future of my iPod song transfer app is a bit uncertain, but I promise it will not be abandoned.

• If you’re an indie developer like Robb Beal, it might mean that I’ve lost some credibility with you. My only defense is that it would be wrong to think of this decision as a repudiation of independent software development. One of the main reasons I continue to love the Macintosh is the quality of its independent developers, and I intend to continue supporting that community in whatever small ways I can, even though I will no longer be a part of it.

So there you have it—hiatus explained. Now all I have to do in the next three weeks is transition myself out of my current job, say good bye to my home of 25 years and nearly everyone I know, get myself moved out to California, find a place to live in one of the most ridiculous real estate markets in the country, and report for orientation at One Infinite Loop. Piece of cake!

A conversation with my friend Josh upon leaving Pirates of the Caribbean last night:

Me: Hmm…so evidently pirates weren’t that bad after all!

Josh: Yeah, they were more like a peacekeeping force!

When I first heard about Pirates, I had absolutely no interest in seeing it, since it smelled of summer blockbusterism and (worse) corporate synergy. Then I started to hear wonderful things about Johnny Depp’s performance (Entertainment Weekly described it memorably as a channeling of Captain Morgan and Keith Richards) and I began to warm up to it. Combine that with the soft spot I’ve had for pirate material since I first encountered Alan Moore’s brilliant comic-within-a-comic, Tales of the Black Freighter (in his magum opus Watchmen), and I was ready to give Disney the benefit of the doubt.

The results were fairly predictable: the movie is a hell of a lot of fun as long as Johnny Depp is on screen, but the moment it shifts its focus away from Captain Jack it becomes fairly tedious. Orlando Bloom’s character is a complete bore, Geoffrey Rush has much less to sink his teeth into than you would expect, and the movie itself could have used a bit more time in the cutting room. Oh—and the ending is extremely weak.

My recommendation: rent it on DVD.

After our rather stressful trip back from Ireland (the specifics of which I will relate in a later blog entry) and a strenuous evening spent walking up and down Oxford Street looking in vain for the Eagle Bar Diner, DeLynn and I decided that it might be nice to sleep in and eat a late breakfast at the East End’s famed Brick Lane Biegel Bake.

Having learned our lesson the night before about going out without knowing precisely where we were going, we we were very careful to make sure we knew the Biegel Bake’s exact address and location on a map. All of this was to no avail, however, since we still ended up walking up and down Brick Lane trying to find the bloody place. It finally turned out that we simply hadn’t been walking far enough (having been confused by the disorganized addressing scheme), but during the time that we were walking, we were able to get a very good look around a part of London that few tourists ever see.

Throughought the trip, we have seen a fair amount of civil protest against the prospective war in Iraq (including a rally in front of the US Embassy in Dublin), but as we walked north along Brick Lane, the number, variety and vehemence of anti-US posters, stickers and graffiti really struck us. The fact that I say “anti-US” instead of “anti-war” is, I think an important distinction—most of these messages (from the graffiti calling President Bush a “fascist” to the posters calling Muslim leaders to unite against the West) seemed to go out of their way to advertise their disdain for the United States.

Later we decided to make a visit to the Barbican Art Gallery to view Sebastiao Salgado’s “Exodus” exhibition—a staggering retrospective of one of the world’s greatest documentary photographers. I was so taken with Salgado’s body of work that I decided to purchase his book, Migrations. When I walked into the gallery book store, however, I was surprised to see, alongside the expected photography monographs and postcards, a whole section devoted to left-wing, anti-American polemics.

I’m not exactly a stranger to foreign travel—this is my sixth trip to Europe and my fourth to the UK—but I can say with some certainty that this is the first time I have ever encountered a level anti-Americanism so high as to make me feel truly uneasy. It will be interesting to see what happens regarding Iraq in the coming weeks and months—it is entirely possible that this wave of anti-American sentiment will pass just as criticism of the first Gulf War did—but I can’t help but wonder if increased resentment against the United States is going to be a hallmark of the post-September 11th world.

Whatever the case, this trip has really piqued my interest in the
phenomenon, and I plan to learn more about it when I get back. I think
I’ll start by reading one of the books I saw in the Barbican book store:
href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0971394253/qid=1047503905/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/103-3100322-6224639">Why
Do People Hate America?.

All winter I promised myself that I would make it up to the mountains a lot this summer, but here it is the middle of July and I’ve barely left Denver. Fortunately, this past weekend I was finally able to brave the morons on Interstate 70 and drive up to Vail for a relaxing weekend with my family. After the last few weeks, which have been a bit crazy, the opportunity to simply sit around at my employer’s stunning West Vail home or wander between Vail Village and Lionshead was welcome indeed! I even managed to take a few photos for the weblog while I was there.

Visitors to Vail Village cooling off in Gore Creek

My youngest brother Bobby on the Eagle Bahn lift

Mount of the Holy Cross, one of Colorado’s Fourteeners

Rainer Brockerhoff is back from vacation and he’s penned a surprisingly thorough (and very informative) series of articles about driving in Europe. This just so happens to be a topic that is very near and dear to my own heart (how many Americans, after all, can say that they’ve taken their rental car for a spin on the Nürburgring?), so I thought I would take advantage of the opportunity to share a few of my own cautionary tales.

• Be careful crossing borders! Languages change suddenly and people get touchy!

  My friends and I learned this the hard way one time while crossing from Switzerland into Italy. There was a sign, you see, instructing motorists to stop at the border. Unfortunately for us, it was in Italian and looked nothing whatsoever like a stop sign. Needless to say, when my friend Ian (who is, quite frankly, a bit of a speed freak) came to the sign, he blew past it without a second thought. We immediately knew something was wrong, however, because one of the Italian border guards promptly came running out of his little office, waving his arms at us.

  We immediately stopped the car and got out to see what he wanted. Looking at us incredulously, he stammered:

  “YOU DON’T RESPECT THE SIGN?”

  For a few tense moments I thought we were going to be in real trouble (the guard looked pissed), but after searching the car and satisfying himself that we weren’t drug runners or international arms dealers or anything like that, he sent us on our merry way. Still, not something I would recommend doing!

  

• Where maps are concerned, trust but verify!

  During the planning for the same trip, my friends and I contrived a complicated series of car rentals designed to allow us to see a good chunk of Western Europe by car while avoiding the hefty surcharges auto rental companies levy when you return a car in a different country.

  The most ingenious stage of this plan involved renting a car in Munich, driving it through alpine Germany and Switzerland, and ending up at the foot of Mont Blanc in Courmayeur, Italy. The plan was to leave the Munich car in Courmayeur, take the spectacular funicular ride over Mont Blanc, and end up in the French village of Chamonix, where we had a second car rented. We would then drive the new car back to Courmayeur through the convenient Mont Blanc Tunnel, and the aforementioned Ian (who had to head back to Germany and fly out early) would repatriate the original car. The new car, having been rented in France, would be easily returnable in France, and all extra charges would be avoided!

  It was a brilliant plan, but unfortunately there were a few things we hadn’t counted on. The first was that the French side of the funicular was closed due to high winds. You could still go up the Italian side (which, I guess means that the Italians either have better equipment or less concern), but you couldn’t continue down the French side into Chamonix.

  Upon hearing this unfortunate information from a woman at the tourism office in Courmayeur, I was a bit disappointed, but not overly concerned. We still had the tunnel, after all! Just to make sure that we were OK, I nodded my head and said, “But we can still use the tunnel, right?”

  The woman looked at me strangely for a moment—as if I was joking or a moron—and slowly replied, “No—you can’t use the tunnel.” A French couple behind me started to snicker, and I walked out of the office scratching my head.

  It wasn’t until later that we understood this reaction: unbeknownst to us, the route under Mont Blanc had been closed since March 1999, when a truck started a fire in the tunnel that burned for two days and killed 39 people. It didn’t reopen until March 2002, although neither the printed map (which was published in 2001) nor the mapping site we used to plan made any mention of the closure.

  Fortunately, there is another way to get to Chamonix, although it involves a 112 mile detour through switchback-laden mountain roads (see this map), which put us a bit off schedule. In fact, we were lucky to reach Chamonix in time to pick up our car, and we didn’t arrive at our hotel (in Turin, Italy) until around 3:00 AM the next morning.

  

• Driving in Ireland is severely contraindicated!

  To those who are unfamiliar with Ireland, this may sound like a warning not to visit. Rest assured, however, that it’s nothing of the sort! I’ve been to Ireland twice now and it remains one of my favorite places to be (mainly because of its people). After my experiences driving there, however, I would strongly advise visitors to find alternate modes of transport!

  Perhaps this aversion has something to do with the fact that one of my very first experiences in Ireland involved my Dad hitting a curb and utterly demolishing a tire in the middle of Cork. Or maybe it is caused by the speeds at which the Irish seem to navigate unspeakably narrow country roads, or by the confusing signage motorists are expected to rely on for navigation. All of those things definitely figure into it, I think, but I’m pretty sure my association of Ireland with car troubles wasn’t truly cemented until my last trip, when I experienced my first European car accident.

  My two friends and I were in a rented Ford Focus traveling north from Dublin, on our way to visit Newgrange (a prehistoric tomb site—I have a real fondness for those things). Somewhere around the outskirts of Dublin Airport (I’m told it was near a helicopter landing pad), we encountered a very bad situation: the road was wet, and it contained a profusion of what the Irish call “loose chippings.” My friend was, admittedly, driving a little too fast for the conditions, and when he encountered a fork in the road, he followed Yogi Berra’s advice and took it—head on. He tried to hit the brakes pretty early, but thanks to the conditions (I mainly blame the chippings), we were unable to stop and ended up embedding the Focus into a sort of mud embankment.

  Fortunately, a road crew happened along almost immediately to help us out, and a kind Northern Irish gentleman was generous enough to drive us to the Garda Station in Ashbourne, where the local authorities were extremely pleasant (at least Ireland makes up for its lousy driving conditions by being one of the nicest places in the world to have a car accident!). Unfortunately, the rental agency (Sixt Kenning at London Heathrow) was nowhere near as pleasant upon learning that we had wrecked the car in Ireland.

  The UK insurance we had paid for didn’t cover us in Ireland, you see, and, as it turned out, we were liable for all of the damages incurred (which were considerable). For awhile we thought my credit card’s insurance would save the day, but later we found that our claim was denied because Ireland is one of three countries the company refuses to cover (Israel and Jamaica are the other two). It wasn’t until last week that we finally admitted defeat and settled up with Sixt Kenning for the full amount of the repairs—a very painful blow to the old bank account!

  So, then, all grousing about Irish roads aside, the real moral of this story is this: when renting a car in Europe, always remember to tell the company exactly where you are going, and always take whatever extra insurance is necessary to cover you there. Accidents do happen, and when they do, you can’t put a price on the peace of mind being fully insured will give you (particularly when you’re on vacation!).

  

Unfortunately, I’m on a bit of a self-imposed weblogging hiatus right now, having sequestered myself in deep study, but I wanted to do a brief post to let everyone know that Jonas Luster and his ominously named weblog “The Book of FSCK” will be participating in this year’s Blogathon.

Jonas’s chosen charity is Médecins Sans Frontières (I had to say that because it sounds so much cooler than “Doctors Without Borders”), which surely must be one of the world’s most noble and deserving organizations. And the theme he’s chosen for his 24 hours of blogging, which will take him to some of the most desperate places in San Francisco, should be compelling to say the least!

So there you have it, people—get out there and pledge, pledge, pledge!

Steven Frank had a discussion on his weblog yesterday about how the bad wireless connectivity at WWDC had a tendency to make OS X behave badly.

I personally never noticed that problem (most likely because I would just get pissed off at the lousy connectivity and turn Airport off), but his mention reminded me of another extremely reliable way I’ve discovered to hang OS X. I have one of those SanDisk PC Card Compact Flash adapters, which has become my preferred way of getting digicam photos onto my PowerBook. In some previous versions of the OS it would work flawlessly, but in more recent versions (I’m afraid I can’t say exactly when the cutoff occurred) inserting the adapter has become a sure fire way to render my machine temporarily comatose! And I’m not just talking about the Finder hanging or something—my computer (mouse pointer and all) literally stops responding for at least a few minutes.

Given the longevity of this bug, I can’t help but wonder if it has something to do with my specific make and model of camera or compact flash card (although I mostly use a Nikon Coolpix 990, which is probably one of the most popular digicams of all time, so I doubt that). Come to think of it, it may actually be fixed in Panther—I’ll have to check when I get home.

(Update: I’m happy to report that the CF adapter works flawlessy in Panther. Looks like yet another indication that 10.3 is going to be a great release!)

I’ve been in San Francisco for a day and a half now and I’m already vividly remembering all of the reasons I’ve never been a big fan of the place. The omnipresent homeless population, the constant pleas for money, the smells, the grunge, the sheer cheesiness of Fisherman’s Wharf, the prevailing “do your own thing, even if it inconveniences others” attitude, the self-righteously liberal politics. I feel like standing in front of the mirror in my hotel room and performing something similar to Edward Norton’s “Fuck You, New York” monologue from 25th Hour!

Like Norton’s character, though, I would most likely realize by the end of my tirade that there are, in fact, a lot of things I like about the city. This evening I walked—and I do mean walked—from my hotel near Union Square clear over Nob Hill all the way to Fisherman’s Wharf (which I was visiting, despite my aversion to it, because it is home to San Francisco’s only In-N-Out Burger, and it just wouldn’t be a trip to California without a visit to my favorite indigenous fast food chain!). While the trip was arduous, it was also rewarding, in that it gave me feel for the city that I never quite got on my previous trip.

As Tom Coates pointed out during his last visit, SimCity seems to owe a lot of its aesthetic to San Francisco, and I think there’s a reason for that: if you were to build a city from scratch, the Bay Area is definitely one of the most interesting and naturally beautiful canvases you could ask for. Unlike, say, Denver (which is built on a huge, almost completely waterless plane and is therefore eminently uninteresting in terms of layout), San Francisco’s peninsular location, it’s hilly terrain, and surrounding bay (or estuary if you want to get technical) creates an incredible amount of geographical drama and necessitates awe-inspiring engineering achievements like the Golden Gate and Bay bridges. Even looking at the apartment buildings clinging the precipitous hillside on Taylor Street this evening inspired in me something akin to vertigo!

It’s just too bad that, as James Duncan Davidson has said, the stunning natural setting of San Francisco Bay has to be ruined by “all the bad things that have layered on top of the city.” If only real life was more like SimCity—I’d love to put in one of those unlimited money cheat codes and give this place what it really deserves!

While I’m on the subject of “The Great PodKit Refactoring,” I wanted to take a moment to ask a favor of those of you with iPods. You see, my goal is to raise PodKit’s performance on large database files to iTunes levels, but my current test database (on my own iPod) maxes out around 2,300 songs. In order to really give PodKit a workout, I need much larger database files!

So, if I could trouble some of you musical packrats to send me your iPod database files, I would really appreciate it. You can extract the database file from your iPod using an ancient technique I have written out here (make sure your iPod is in FireWire disk mode first). Then simply email it to me at the address listed further down in the page (I don’t want to write it out here for fear of Spam!).

Thanks! Oh—and I promise not to tell anyone about your extensive NSYNC collection!

Anyone wondering why it’s been so long between PodWorks releases might be interested to know that I’ve been working on a complete refactoring of PodKit, my iPod database parser, for several weeks now (yes, even during WWDC!). Part of this reason I’m doing this is to facilitate AppleScriptability by improving my object model. The real emphasis, though, is on raw performance.

The current version does a respectable job, but is somewhat bogged down by a truly horrific amount of dynamic memory allocation—the cost of doing everything with objects (PodKit positively hemmorages NSData instances!). I’ve been told that once the database size reaches 6,000 or so, the parser speed severely degrades. And that is just not acceptable!

Thus, performance has become a new obsession of mine, and I’ve been looking for any tricks I can use to optimize PodKit as much as possible. The WWDC session on the subject of Cocoa performance was, I believe, cancelled, but fortunately Apple’s own Eric Albert has been kind enough to post the slides from his MacHack presentation “Application Performance on Mac OS X.” The slides only provide a basic outline of the talk (which I’m sure was quite enlightening in its full form), but I think it provides a good list of the things one needs to be concerned with when trying to get an application to run really, really fast.

Thanks to Eric for lending a hand to speed freak app developers like myself!