Ah it's grand.
Sure.

Sometime ago I decided that I needed to improve my programming skills and decided to take on a personal project to develop an application that would give me a rounded application in development and actual programming. The project I chose was to try to write a blogging client for OS X (>= 10.2) that would be open source. There were two reasons for this:

• I had just started blogging.
  • No such open source client existed on OS X (that I am/was aware of)

I started off writing it in Java and was able to get some success relatively quickly with the Blogger and MetaWeblog APIs. However I ran into lots of problems on the GUI side as I was trying to build a Cocoa Application. I decided recently that I would try to pick up Objective-C and I’ve had a lot more success with the GUI. I’ve also managed to get work done using the APIs that WordPress supports however I’ve recently run into problems that are infuriating to try and fix. It’s also difficult to get concise documentation on the APIs. Blogger just has the 1.0 spec up while WP supports what seems to be Blogger 2.0 as well. Unfortunately Blogger.com have decided (July 2003) that they aren’t going ahead with Blogger 2.0 and are moving to a SOAP style API. MetaWeblog APIs seem poorly documented (I’m open to correction because I’m new to this and do make mistakes), I can only see an RFC on xmlrpc.com which doesn’t really do justice to the potential power of the API.

Interesting ride back from the bank to the hotel this evening, hopped into a taxi and in the usual broken conversation got across the idea where I wanted to go. There is a large roundabout on the motorway outside the hotel, which has a fountain and a statue I think. There are lots of marches to and around it, sometimes the rent-a-mob ‘riots’. This evening there was a candlelight march about something and it was slowing traffic down a shitload. There was a taxi in front of mine that had just stopped in the road and the driver was talking to some of the people in the march. My driver was beeping the horn and trying to get him to move so we could continue. A police officer appeared and waved the taxi on but he still wasn’t moving. He starts talking louder to the people in the march and it turns out he’s asking them for a push as his car has stalled. Out run two of them and the police offer to shove him on his way. My toothless taxi driver then bursts into rasping laughter and a stream of Indonesian Bahasa. I’m always amazed by the fact that people try to start a conversation again in the language I’ve so plainly shown absolute ignorance of.

I was searching around on Google trying to find out how to use a third party Framework (like Cocoa XML-RPC Framework) and found a reference to http://rentzsch.com/ where there is a great section on Embedded Frameworks. The video is a rare treat, it would be very good to be taught by this guy …

Following on from the discussion that we had at the last mac meetup, I’ve committed to blogging about something other than blogging. I was going to write a stroppy entry about Singaporean behaviours that were pissing me off. I’m trying to avoid that as much as possible so I was fortunate to find something positive to talk about.

Neville, Michael B and I went out for a few beers that ended up taking us to the Mitre where we talked a lot of shite, and bitched quite a bit.

I’m trying to learn Objective-C at the moment, I’ve given up on trying to develop a GUI app for OS X using Java. Learning a new language is a pain. At this point many people would point out that good programming is language agnostic (I’m using that word rather a lot these days in conversations that have nothing to do with religion). ‘A good programmer can use any language to program well’, they would say. At this point I would say I’m a shite programmer. I use Java at work and can accomplish most tasks, none of them are GUI based. In fact what I work on doesnt impact the user interface at all. Not that there is much of one as it’s server side. Anyway, enough digression. I was trying to use the NSOutlineView, for my blogging client, to display titles and contents. Content is a child of a Title which is a child of a Blog, so I had decided to make each blog entry an NSMutableArray. Each array would contain two objects; the title (index 0) and the contents (index 1). This isn’t very clever as it turns out. I looked at examples from Apple and got confused by the sematics of C. I thought the bit of C I had done before would be sufficient along with a copy of Apple’s Objective-C implementation guide. Looks like I need to work on my C as well. I mean, just wtf does return (item == nil) ? 1 : [item numberOfChildren]; mean?

Well, I now have my latest object of desire; an iPaq. It’s the 5450 and I have Familiar (unstable 16)/Opie loaded up on it. It’s actually one of the easiest distros I’ve ever installed. There are some things missing, most noticeably support for the inbuilt bluetooth module. This would be nice to have so that I could try pairing it up with my Nokia 6230. I’m working on a write-up of the process and hopefully I’ll have that up on the main site soon.

I think Apple should be giving me commission for the number of Powerbook purchases I’ve influenced. I’m now up to 4, the latest is Kim Yong. I’ll soon have everyone moving over to Apple. I just wish I could afford a G5 …

 

This is going to be a laugh, I’m organising an installfest for LUGS. It’s funny how things can be political even among a group of enthusiasts with highly similar interests and goals. In this case; Open Source, well Linux in this case, advocacy. Hmmm …

My new object of desire is an IPAQ, strange enough one would think, given my dislike of Microsoft operating systems. However, one can My new object of desire is an IPAQ, strange enough one would think, given my dislike of Microsoft operating systems. However, one can on one of these. I’ve got so pissed off with the messing around over SD WiFi & Palm’s Tungsten T. It’s not too much to ask in this day and age that a PDA be capable of a selection of wireless communication methods. We shall see ..

Sod it, got away with only one bloody knuckle after re-arranging my PCs. redbreast   has moved to a PIII Celeron as it really doesn’t need anything more powerful. kilkenny   is moving to my P4 and was to return to Mandrake as I got pissed of with Fedora rather quickly. Only problem is; I can’t find the sodding CDs to install with. Now I have to go and hunt down the ISOs which are sitting on another HDD waiting to go into redbreast. redbreast is, off course, in the middle of a cvsup. Oh well …