Monthly Archives: October 2009

Global Warming

Posted on October 11, 2009 by MXH

A quick thought experiment. It’s currently a pretty popular notion that: Human activity is causing the climate to change (warm), and therefore We can and should take action to reverse this change Suppose we struck out the first statement, and … Continue reading →

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Crazy Talk

Posted on October 9, 2009 by MXH

Today, something frivolous. Perhaps you’re acquainted with Infocom’s 1983 classic, Planetfall? It’s a good game, but today I want to talk about its manual. Planetfall’s manual included a recruitment pitch/application form for the “Stellar Patrol”, and the form included a … Continue reading →

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objectAtIndexPath:

Posted on October 8, 2009 by MXH

I’ve praised the amazingly useful NSFetchedResultsController before, but today I want to point out a tiny little problem with this class, or at least its documentation. Briefly, objectAtIndexPath: will sometimes return objects for invalid index paths.

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Table Updates & Scrolling

Posted on October 5, 2009 by MXH

I want to follow up on a post from a few weeks ago; I’d posted some code that demonstrated how an NSFetchedResultsController could be used to automatically update a UITableView when the data in a ManagedObjectContext were changed. Unfortunately, that … Continue reading →

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NekNek Update

Posted on October 4, 2009 by MXH

On Friday, I discussed how to add support for no-op variants to the Python-based KenKen puzzle solver that we’ve seen before. Today, I folded those enhancements into the JavaScript-based, web-accessible version of the solver. (It’s oh-so-cleverly named “NekNek”.) If you’ve … Continue reading →

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No-op KenKen Solver

Posted on October 2, 2009 by MXH

A popular KenKen variant is the “no-op” puzzle, in which only the result of a cage is given. (In “standard” KenKen, both the result and an operator are given.) A reader wrote in with a question about a no-op puzzle, … Continue reading →

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Deep Copying (Bug Fix)

Posted on October 1, 2009 by MXH

A few months ago I wrote a short piece on creating deep mutable copies of plist data structures. Today, a (modestly anonymous) reader was kind enough to write in with a bug fix, which I would like to share with … Continue reading →

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