Sci-Fi Hi-Fi

I’ve kind of been asleep at the Cocoalicious wheel for awhile now, which is a shame because not only have there been some well known problems, I also left the CVS repository in a bad enough state to prevent anyone besides me from fixing said problems. What can I say: it’s summertime, and the living is easy.

Fortunately, I have finally managed to scrape together enough time to get the two biggest problems (a crasher, and a bug that would allow the post cache on disk to be overwritten by blank data in some conditions) fixed. Check out Cocoalicious 1.0b43 for the fixes.

In case anyone’s wondering, the crashing problem that I got so many complaints about had to do with URLs containing literal percent signs, such as the following:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%s

Basically, the issue was that if you pass NSURL’s URLWithString: method a URL like that, it will simply return nil instead of a new NSURL, because it tries to interpret the “%s” as an escape code, and it’s not a valid escape code. I wasn’t checking for nil before I tried to insert the new URL into an NSArray, which is what would actually cause the crash. The solution would seem simple: just escape the percent sign before you turn the string into a URL object, so you end up with:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%25s

And this does indeed work, until you submit the URL to del.icio.us and then re-download it. When you get this URL back in the del.icio.us post XML, what you end up with is:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=%2525s

In other words, del.icio.us escaped the percent sign again (”%25″ is the escape code for the percent sign), which means if you edit that post in Cocoalicious and re-submit it, you’ll end up with an incorrect URL.

I’m not sure whether I can consider this a bug or not (it seems to me that del.icio.us shouldn’t naively re-escape the percent signs at the beginning of valid escape sequences), but until I figure out what to do about it, this is going to be a known issue in Cocoalicious.

Lately a lot of people have been asking me questions about whether or not I’m going to be putting on a dinner or party in conjunction with WWDC. The answer is: yes, of course! The problem is, this year my plans for the shindig are a bit more ambitious, and I simply haven’t had a lot of time to investigate the logistics yet.

Because I have yet to finalize any of my grand plans, and I don’t want to disappoint people if they don’t work out, I’ve been intentionally tightlipped so far, but I do realize people want to make plans, so I’ll provide a few details now:

• This year I plan to transition completely away from a dinner held in a restaurant and toward a proper party in a dedicated venue. I do still hope to have some refreshments provided by a local San Francisco legend (more on this later if it actually works out).
• The party will be held, as always, on the first day of WWDC–which this year means August 7th.
• If everything works out as planned, this year’s will feature some additional attractions beyond the party itself.
• There’s a good chance that the venue will be 21+, which, sadly, means many students will be unable to attend. I’m going to try to work around this, but if not, my apologies to our undergrad friends.
• I eventually plan to gauge attendance by posting an event on Upcoming.org, but it would be interesting to see through the comments here what peoples’ reactions to the above are.

Thanks everyone for your patience as I figure this out, and I look forward to seeing you August 7th!