Monthly Archives: May 2009

Uh-Oh (Objective-C)

Posted on May 18, 2009 by MXH

I’ve been learning Objective-C, the native language of iPhone development. Overall it seems like a reasonable language, albeit one that’s pretty tightly integrated with Xcode. (The large number of lengthy constants used in Cocoa/Objective-C programming would make me reluctant to … Continue reading →

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I Hope This Isn’t True

Posted on May 17, 2009 by MXH

I was reading some iPhone docs last week – specifically, the Cocoa Fundamentals Guide, and I came across this remarkable statement: Programming becomes largely an exercise in assembling the programmatic components that Cocoa provides along with the custom objects and … Continue reading →

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Taxes

Posted on May 16, 2009 by MXH

Looking at a receipt the other day, I noticed that the combined state and local sales tax in my area (Silicon Valley) had reached 9.25%. Even as I type that, I find it hard to believe. It’s motivated me to … Continue reading →

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Load/Save

Posted on May 15, 2009 by MXH

When I implemented my web-based port of Taipan!, I added one minor feature: I let the user save (and load) a game to (or from) a single savegame ‘slot’. It can take a few hours to work your score up … Continue reading →

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Learn to Program

Posted on May 14, 2009 by MXH

One of the best introductory programming books I’ve ever seen is entitled “The IBM PC from the Inside Out“. This is an assembly language oriented guide to the programming and operation of the 8086-based IBM PC. It suffers from being … Continue reading →

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Sunk Costs

Posted on May 13, 2009 by MXH

Seth’s got a pretty good post up on the importance of ignoring sunk costs. He makes a couple of mistakes, however, that are worth clearing up.

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Firefox Cookies

Posted on May 12, 2009 by MXH

Several weeks ago I updgraded to Firefox 3.  It worked fine, except for one strange behaviour:  It deleted all cookies every time it was shut down.  (I realize that this is sometimes the desired behaviour, but I didn’t like it, … Continue reading →

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JavaScript Cookies

Posted on May 11, 2009 by MXH

It’s pretty simple to manipulate cookies in JS, but there are a few gotchas. Browser incompatibilities naturally crop up, although somewhat differently than you might expect; some browsers are more permissive of the Wrong Thing than others, so you might … Continue reading →

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Working Actors

Posted on May 10, 2009 by MXH

I was watching “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit” the other day (okay movie, desperately needs about 40m of cuts) and thought I recognized one of the actors by his voice. After a little searching, I found him on … Continue reading →

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New Taipan! Port

Posted on May 8, 2009 by MXH

I enjoyed Jay Link’s JS version of Taipan! so much that I just had to play a complete version. So, I took his C/ncurses version and ported it to JavaScript. The port is available here. (Warning: It’s feature-complete in terms … Continue reading →

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