Joey Gibson’s Blog

The Original Satellite Spigot

A couple of years ago, I built the device shown in the photo on the right. It’s an extension to our back yard garden hose, which is down 15 stairs, up to the deck. That project didn’t take any time at all, and has worked nicely. This year, my wife wanted a similar device in the front yard. The reason it was necessary can be seen in figures 2 and 3. We have some unruly bushes that make it extremely difficult to get to the spigot. I decided to create another of my satellite spigots right next to the stairs on the front porch, which would make it very easy to use the hose.

This project started about two months ago. I went to Lowe’s to get the parts, but didn’t feel like building it that day, so I put it of for a few weeks. When I finally did get around to building it, it was one problem after another. First, there was a problem with the coupling between the hose and the galvanized pipe. That allowed me to procrastinate another couple of weeks. This past Saturday, I went to Lowe’s again to get a new coupling. I brought it home, re-taped the galvanized pipe’s threads and attached the coupling. I then attached the hose to the coupling and turned on the water. Immediately it began spewing from somewhere around the coupling. Upon closer inspection, I could see that the leak was actually in the hose. It turns out that the brass end of the hose is not a single piece of metal. It’s actually two pieces crimped together, and in my zeal to make the connections as tight as possible, I had broken that seal.

Sunday, I went to Lowe’s, again, to get a new male hose-end to fix it. I also had to re-buy the metal straps I had bought to attach it to its pole, because in the weeks since my last attempt I had lost them. (And those were not the original metal straps, either. The first ones I bought were far too large…) After I got home, I cut off the last 2 inches or so of the hose with a serrated bread knife attached the new male end, screwed it into the coupling; tight, but not too tight. Then it was time to test it out. Again.

Huzzah! It works! No leaks!

After getting the seals right, all that was left was to attach it to the metal pole I had driven into the ground. That went quickly, and the project was finally complete.

A day or so ago Apple released Safari 4.0.1 and bumped the version number in the process. Safari 4.0 was 5530.17, while Safari 4.0.1 is 5530.18. After installing the update, MiddleClickClose was still loading, even with the minor version mismatch. I don’t know if Safari only looks at the first part of the number when specified in an Info.plist for MaxBundleVersion, but just to be on the safe side, I bumped it to 5530.18 and have re-released it. If it’s working fine for you, don’t bother getting this version. That’s the only change I made.

I just got back from an estate sale in my neighborhood. The people whose belongings were being sold were an elderly couple who lived just around the corner from me. I never met them, but I knew who they were. They both appeared to be quite old, but both were always working in their yard to keep it immaculate. They always had something blooming, no matter the season.

And now they’re gone. The gentleman passed away some time last year; I don’t know the details of his passing. The wife is still alive, but living in Texas in a “retirement community” near her daughter. I’m told she’s struggling with Alzheimer’s.

And so this weekend her family came to sell off everything that was left of their lives together, in order to get the house ready for sale. I don’t mean to cast aspersions on the family, as I know that these things have to be done, but while I was looking through what was left for sale, I got very sad. Scattered around were all sorts of bits and pieces of their lives that showed what they liked and what they liked to do. The wife, for example, apparently loved to quilt. She had what appeared to be about 30 – 40 years of quilting magazines in the basement. There were numerous pieces of cross-stitch and embroidery on a table, too.

It looked like the husband had been in telecom, as there were spools of wire and loads of antiquated telephone equipment in the basement. There was also a framed award from 1980 presented to him from his employer. One thing of interest to me was a booklet produced by the Travelers insurance company for their employees in 1972, detailing their policies on reimbursement for moving and living expenses. I don’t know which of them worked in insurance.

So what did I pick for myself? I have a thing for food photography from the 1950’s and 1960’s, and there was quite a collection there. I bought an almost-complete set of the Woman’s Day Encyclopedia of Cooking series from 1962; it’s missing the last three volumes. I also bought a 1972 edition of the standard Better Homes & Gardens cookbook (red and white checks) and a cookbook from 1974 called “Favorite Recipes of America’s Home Economics Teachers.” One non-cookbook also made it into my hands. It’s a book called “Papa Was a Preacher,” which was published in 1944. It’s a memoir of the youngest of six children of a rural minister. She wrote the book with the intention of dispelling the myth that being a minister’s child is a joyless existence. What was also neat about this book is that on the copyright page the publisher explained how “Wartime Books” were being printed in ways that conserved paper and copper for the war effort.

So why did this make me sad? I think it’s because these two people spent two lifetimes together collecting all this stuff. Now one is dead, the other can’t be far behind, and all of their things are being scattered in every direction. I know once you’re gone you can’t keep your stuff, and children don’t always want to keep the things of their parents, so I suppose selling it certainly beats throwing it away. Still… I felt sad and somewhat guilty to be picking through their lives.

Yesterday, like six billion other people, I tried to pre-order a new iPhone 3GS from the Apple Store online. After trying multiple times getting multiple timeouts, I was finally given a message stating that they could not complete my request online, and that I needed to go to a brick-and-mortar Apple Store to complete it. This didn’t completely shock me since when I bought my first generation iPhone, I could not activate it through iTunes, and instead had to visit an AT&T store.

Shortly afterward, I received an email from concierge@apple.com, with this text

Thanks for starting your iPhone purchase online. To finish the process, come to the store you selected and look for a Concierge in an orange shirt. We’ll help you complete your purchase, activate your new iPhone, and set it up for you.

Apart from the fact that I didn’t select a store, this was in sync with what the online store told me. A pain to have to visit an actual store, to be sure, but it didn’t sound like it would be too painful.

So today, I drove to the mall and visited the Apple Store. As soon as I entered, I spied an orange-shirted “concierge” and approached her. “Hello,” I said, “I tried to preorder an iPhone 3GS yesterday online, but it said it couldn’t do it, and I needed to seek out an orange-shirted person at an Apple Store. Can you help me with this?” She looked pained as she responded, “I’m sorry… we don’t actually have a system in place to pre-0rder the 3GS.” She went on to say that they did have a pre-order system for when the 3G was launched, and she assumed they would move that system over for the 3GS, but they had nothing now, and I should come back on the 19th. She also said that “lots” of people had been coming in today, who had also been told to visit a store to complete their purchase.

That just sucks out loud.

I’m trying really, really hard to throw money at Apple and they just won’t take it. They clearly underestimated how many people would try to pre-order online yesterday, otherwise they would have had more server bandwidth to handle it. The fact that they sent me (and others) an email telling me to go to a store to finish the process, when they have no such process in place, is just sloppy. I’m not happy about this one little bit, and I want people to know about it.

Does this mean I’m not going to buy a 3GS and, instead, go with a Pre or something else? Of course not, and Apple knows this….

05/31/2009 Update: As Mads Andersen pointed out, in the example below, I had the Complex multiplication wrong. As I was working through the example in the book, I typed it incorrectly. I could argue that this blog post was not about my mastery of complex numbers, and was actually meant to show how operator overloading works in Scala, but in the interest of all-around correctness, I have updated the code to contain the proper implementation of complex number multiplication, and I have worked out the examples by hand using the formula on the Wikipedia page to ensure their accuracy. Now, on to the original article.

I’ve been intrigued by Scala for a while now, and I’m finally taking the time to learn it. As I was reading in my book yesterday, I came to the section on operator overloading. Now, this is a topic that developers who’ve been exposed to it feel very strongly about. It’s not quite as rough a discussion as vi vs. Emacs, but it’s close. Some say that operator overloading makes for more elegant code. Some say it just confuses things. I’ve always been in the elegant camp. I think if you can provide operators for your own classes that work intuitively, you ought to be able to do it. In Java, think about how nice BigDecimal would be to use if you had + and – instead of add() and subtract(). Of course, as with anything of power, you have to be careful not to abuse it. It would make no sense to provide a + operator on a Date class, since adding two dates together makes no sense. You have to be smart about it, but having the ability to provide operators for your own classes performing intuitive functions is a good thing.

So as I’m reading the section on operator overloading, it was nice to see that even though you can override the standard mathematical operators, Scala still maintains the proper precedence that everyone is used to. By this I mean that a + b * c will execute the multiplication first, then add the product of b and c to a. The reason this is interesting is because another language that I still love, Smalltalk, does it wrong (or at least, completely differently), and not just for overloaded operators. Smalltalk has no precedence for mathematical operators at all, ever. So a + b * c will execute the + operation on a, passing in b, and then execute the * operation on that result, passing in c. Always. Thus, 2 + 3 * 5 = 25 in Smalltalk, even though it should equal 17. To get 17, you’d have to write the equation as 2 + (3 * 5). I always found that strange.

The canonical example for operator overloading is a class to represent Complex numbers. I will not break with tradition and will, in fact, steal borrow the one from the book. Here, then, is the definition of the Complex class

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class Complex(val real:Int, val imaginary:Int) {
    def +(operand:Complex):Complex = {
        new Complex(real + operand.real, imaginary + operand.imaginary)
    }
 
    def *(operand:Complex):Complex = {
        new Complex(real * operand.real - imaginary * operand.imaginary, 
            real * operand.imaginary + imaginary * operand.real)
    }
 
    override def toString() = {
        real + (if (imaginary < 0) "" else "+") + imaginary + "i"
    }
}

Notice that we have overridden both the + and * operators. They each take another instance of Complex as an argument, do the proper operations and return a new instance of Complex as their result. Just as you would expect. Now, to exercise these operators, we have this

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val c1 = new Complex(1, 2)
val c2 = new Complex(2, -3)
val c3 = c1 + c2
 
val res = c1 + c2 * c3
 
printf("(%s) + (%s) * (%s) = %s\n", c1, c2, c3, res)
 
val res1 = c1 + c2 * c3 + c1 * c2
 
printf("(%s) + (%s) * (%s) + (%s) * (%s) = %s\n", c1, c2, c3, c1, c2, res1)

Lines 5 and 9 are the interesting parts. The result of running these statements looks like this

(1+2i) + (2-3i) * (3-1i) = 4-9i
(1+2i) + (2-3i) * (3-1i) + (1+2i) * (2-3i) = 12-8i

which is exactly what you’d expect.

Now, C++ people are probably saying, “But C++ has always done it right!” Indeed. But languages like Smalltalk and Scala are far more fun to work in.

From FOX News comes this little gem Georgia Republican Wants Obama to Make 2010 Year of the Bible. According to the article, GA Representative Paul Broun has introduced a resolution calling on President Obama to declare 2010 the “Year of the Bible.”  The article makes the point that the great Ronaldus Magnus already did this back in 1983, so I guess it’s not completely unheard of. Still, this strikes me as somewhat silly and a waste of Rep Broun’s time.

A bit of the resolution reads

“The president is encouraged … to issue a proclamation calling upon citizens of all faiths to rediscover and apply the priceless, timeless message of the Holy Scripture which has profoundly influenced and shaped the United States and its great Democratic form of government, as well as its rich spiritual heritage, and which has unified, healed and strengthened its people for over 200 years.”

He wants “people of all faiths” to “rediscover” the Bible. I wonder how he would react if some other representative offered up a resolution calling upon Obama to declare 2010 the “Year of the Koran” and asked “citizens of all faiths to rediscover the priceless, timeless message of the Holy Koran.” I doubt he’d support that one. Yes, you could argue that the Bible did influence our founding fathers and that the Koran did not, but still. Calling on people of “all faiths” to read your holy book has a name. It’s called proselytizing.

What‽ How can this be? Barack “Jesus” Obama is proposing indefinite “preventive” detention for crimes people haven’t committed yet? I thought only Republicans were evil enough to come up with plans like that!

Obama proposes Indefinite Preventive Detention without trial – Behind Blue Eyes – Open Salon.

I heard about this the other day, but SecDef Gates has mentioned it again, and I liked this quote

“Any soldier who goes into battle against the Taliban in pink boxers and flip-flops has a special kind of courage. I can only wonder about the impact on the Taliban. Just imagine seeing that – a guy in pink boxers and flip-flops has you in his crosshairs.”

via NPR: Gates Defends Soldier’s Pink Undies.

In April of 2008, the owner of the company I worked for told me that he was, effectively, shutting down the company and that I needed to find a new job by June. I was not happy. Over the previous 3.5 years, I had been the entire tech department, I had built every piece of software the company had, and I was extremely emotionally invested in the company. I started looking at opportunities and chased several opportunities, but none panned out.

Ironically, the company I was leaving was an online job search company…

Finally, I contacted an old friend to see if his company had any opportunities. They did, and I interviewed with the team the following week. It was a *six hour interview*, during which my friend stayed out of it, to keep any personal bias from influencing the team. A few days later, they made an offer, which I accepted. Did I mention the *six hour interview*?

I’ve been with them for nearly a year and I can honestly say it’s the best fit in a job I’ve ever experienced. While I enjoyed working completely alone, as I had done for the previous 3.5 years, the team I have joined is the best, and smarted, I’ve ever seen.

Looking at it now, my previous company closing was really the best thing that could have happened to me.

We’re on vacation in Colonial Williamsburg, and the AT&T signal in and around our hotel sucks! This seems to be a common theme for me. At home, I have next to no AT&T signal. I swear, if it weren’t for the iPhone being such a loverly machine, I would never have gone with AT&T. Anyway, so we’re here in Williamsburg, and in the hotel, there is no cellular signal at all. But there is free, and fast, WiFi. So I fired up the Skype program on my iPhone and would you believe it worked a treat? It did. I have now made two calls with it. One to a restaurant in town, and the other to my brother-in-law back in GA to check on our dog. Both calls were crystal clear, with no lag or dropouts. I only have a 1G iPhone, so I can’t test it over the cellular network, but over WiFi, it was darn near perfect. I have a Skype unlimited subscription, so these calls were essnetially free. In any event, it was better than paying the $0.75 the hotel would have charged me for each call, plus whatever rate the local phone company charged. But beyond the cost, it was just plain cool!

I’ve been a fan of Skype for several years and we use it extensively where I work. I call into meetings and conference calls using it all the time, and I only very rarely have problems. I am now equally impressed with Skype for iPhone. Great job, guys! Keep up the great work.

Tonight we went to the Merchant Square section of Williamsburg to find something to eat. While we did end up finding a lovely restaurant with wonderful food, we also found street preachers shouting hellfire and damnation to anyone who would listen. One guy was holding a gigantic sign saying something along the lines of “DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU’LL SPEND ETERNITY? Heaven or HELL!?!?!??!” The second guy was just sort of standing there, and the third guy was actually doing the shouting/preaching. I crossed on the other side of the street, but what I could hear of his rantings, he was going on about “man lying with man” and “depravity” and “Jesus love you!”

Now, most of you know that I’m a Christian. I have been for a long time, though I never had a “born again” moment that so many people think you have to have. My son was born into a Christian home, so I doubt he’ll ever have one of those moments either. (I just read a very interesting discussion on the B-Greek mailing list concerning how the passage about how you must be “born again” could also be translated as “born from above,” but that’s a topic for another day.) So anyway, this guy was shouting about how much “Jesus loves you,” alternating with how homosexuals are all going to burn in hell. It’s crap like this that gives all Christians a bad name. When you talk about the same God loving “you” and damning certain people in the same breath, there’s something wrong. I’ve heard of “love the sinner, hate the sin,” which I think is fine, but that’s not what this guy was saying.

I think it is presumptious for humans to declare what God will and will not accept. There is scant evidence from the Bible that homosexuality is the mortal sin that some seem to think/claim it is. I believe in a benevolent God who wants his creations to eventually come back to Him. How and when that happens, I don’ t know. If you read your Bible, you’ll see that it isn’t exactly spelled out. There are lots of grey areas when it comes to “the path to salvation.” I tend to think that a truly loving God, and that’s what the New Testament tells us we have, would provide as many ways as possible to ensure that His creations found their way back to him. My way is through Jesus. Some find their way through Buddah. Some through various Hindu gods. Some through Allah. Some through other means. There, I said it. (I have one particular friend, whom I know is reading this right now, whose heart probably just skipped a beat at what I just said…) Baptists would throw me out for that. Presbyterians would probably laugh, since everything’s already been decided, anyway. Methodists, of which I am one, would probably call me misguided. My Sunday School teacher would call me enlightened, because that’s exactly how he feels. I truly believe that people who are doing their absolute best to live moral lives, to treat fellow human beings with respect and kindness and to make our world a better place, even though they haven’t “accepted Jesus as their lord and savior,” I still believe those people are going to be welcomed back into God’s presence, somehow. You don’t have to agree with me, but that’s what I think.

I also don’t believe that “hell” exists as the fiery furnace of eternal torment that some believe it to be. I believe that “hell” is actually eternal (?) separation from God. People gleefully and self-righteously telling others that they must “turn or burn” really annoy me. Anyway, I’m sort of rambling at this point and alienating my Christian friends. I do wonder, if we were to sit down with those street preachers, how many “rules” from the Bible we could find that they are breaking, and thus putting their own souls in harm’s way. I would be willing to bet there’d be at least one.

Yesterday about 4:30 I tried to check my email, but got nothing more than a string of 502 errors from the server. My mail server is a Google Domain Apps account, which means my MX record points to Google, and they handle the rest. I was about to leave the office, so I figured I would just check later when I got home. I checked from my iPhone a few times on the way, but it was still borked. About two hours after the problem began, it cleared up again, and is still working fine.

During the outage, I started thinking about this situation. I have 916 megabytes of email stored in my Gmail account. That’s a lot, though it is only 12% of my quota. That’s three years of email that I don’t want to lose. And I’m completely at the mercy of “the cloud” with respect to my email. There is no way for me to back that email up and Google makes no guarantees about data retention. They give us 7G+ of space, but they don’t claim to do any backups or that they can get your email back if it goes away. Is this just a cost of living in the cloud? I wouldn’t trade my Gmail account for anything, so I guess I just have to live with the danger, right? Is there anything a Gmail user can do to ensure their email has some sort of protection? I know that I could open another gmail account and have every incoming email forward to that other account, but is that really the only choice? Google does offer a plan that is $50/email address/year, and while it does have a 99.9% uptime guarantee, it doesn’t say anything about backups.

What would be nice is an interface from Gmail to Mozy or Carbonite or some other online backup service. Each Gmail user could then decide if he wanted to contract with one of those third-party services for backups, or just take his chances.

Today is tax day in the US. Like many others, I waited until the last possible moment to file and pay, because I knew I was going to get screwed. I electronically filed my taxes last night, but I will be mailing a big, fat check to the IRS today to cover the rest of what I owe. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I will be sending a big, fat check the IRS for what I can afford to pay of what I still owe. I will pay the rest next month. Here, then, are some random musings about tax day.

• We need tax reform. Either the Fair Tax or a flat tax. Either one would be preferable to what we have now.
• We need to abolish withholding and force everyone to either make quarterly estimated payments, or pay the full amount on April 15. People would suddenly realize how much they are getting screwed and would demand tax reform.
• If you ask someone, “How much did you have to pay in taxes this year?” and they respond with “Oh! I didn’t have to pay anything, I’m getting a refund!” you should immediately punch them in the face, because they are completely clueless about our tax system.
• These absurd “tea parties” that Republicans are throwing do nothing but make them look stupid. They won’t actually accomplish anything. Neither will mailing tea bags to your Congressmen.
• Our government is far too large, much larger than it is Constitutionally allowed to be. Massive program and spending cuts are needed to reduce the burden on taxpayers.
• “Progressive” tax systems, like what we have in the US, are not “progressive” at all. In fact, they are abusive to the high achievers. According to the Tax Foundation, the Top 1% of income earners, who account for 16.5% of income, pay 33.7% of the taxes. The bottom 50%, who account for 13.9% of income, pay only 3.6% of the taxes. How is that fair? It isn’t. Our tax system is designed to punish “the rich,” and it’s only going to get worse with Obama and friends in office.

Based on what we’re seeing with federal bailouts and calls for laws to limit executive compensation from Dear Leader, I don’t see things improving any time soon. In fact, I think it’s going to get a lot worse for “the rich” in this country. Obama and friends are fomenting class warfare like we’ve never seen before, enciting “working Americans” to hate “the rich.” That’s the typical Democrat line, but Obama’s charisma and his status as a hero to “working Americans” is giving his pronouncements about the “excesses” of “the rich” more power. Hang out on social networks like Twitter and Friendfeed and you’ll see that the pitchforks are already being sharpened.

This video made me laugh out loud. You have to know some Greek to appreciate the whole thing, but even if you don’t, some of it should still make you laugh.

I complained before about the abysmal storage situation on our Wii. Well, our troubles are lessened, if not necessarily over. On March 25, Nintendo released the latest version of the Wii OS. I only got it three days ago, because our Wii has been acting up, hardware-wise, and I’ve had it turned off. IGN has the full skinny on the update.

Basically, it makes much better use of your SD card, allowing you to keep things on the SD card, and automatically swapping them to the system memory when you need them. I bought two SD cards Monday night, and have moved all our lesser-used channels we want to keep to one card, and setup the other as my Rock Band 2 downloadable content card. I now have nearly 900 free “blocks” on the internal storage, which should mean I won’t run out when downloading RB2 songs again.

For those of you who saw my tweets about losing all my Rock Band 2 data, here’s the full story. A couple of weeks ago, I was buying songs from the RB2 store when I ran out of space on the internal storage. I figured I’d just try again later, so I went to play a song. After playing a song, the game complained that it couldn’t save my progress. I exited the game and restarted, only to be asked if I wanted to create a new save file (uh oh). I said “no” and it said that since I didn’t create a new file, my progress couldn’t be saved. I exited and restarted, this time saying “yes” to create the file. Of course, it created a new one, and all my data was lost. Actually, it was already lost, but this was the final nail in the coffin. I’ve reconnected the new save file to my online account, but all of my character and band data are gone forever. That really sucks, because I’d unlocked tons of songs, cities and venues. Now I have to start over from scratch. At least with the new OS upgrade, I shouldn’t lose my data again because of space issues.

As for the hardware issues I mentioned, the disc drive has been getting extremely noisy and, lately, flaky. Basically, the drive makes lots of noise and sometimes stops spinning altogether. Once it stops spinning, the game chokes and dies and you have to reboot. Based on some things I’ve read on the web, booting the Wii without a disc in the drive helps, and that’s what I’m seeing, too. I really don’t want to have to buy a new Wii, but we may have to before long.

I don’t know that I’d say I’m truly famous, but I am somewhat well-known, in certain circles. I am co-author of the book “Ant Developer’s Handbook”, published by SAMS in 2002. It sold moderately well. I have been published in Java Developer’s Journal twice, in 2002 and 2003.

I am also the creator of MiddleClickClose, a Safari plugin that enables the closing of tabs by clicking your middle mouse button, and for ExportToArchive, a plugin for iPhoto that allows exporting of photos to Zip and other compressed formats.

Some of my friends know that I was an uncredited extra in the box office flop, “Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers”, from way back in 1988. For three days in 1988 I sat around an abandoned YMCA camp in Waco, GA, waiting to be called to the set. I eventually made it into one scene.

If you watched Idol last week, you were treated to a bunch of mediocre renditions of classic Motown songs, plus a stunningly beautiful re-imagining of Smokey Robinson’s “Tracks of My Tears.” Adam Lambert is the one who pulled off that coup. He sang with an acoustic guitar, upright bass and slapboard-drum-type-thing, and it was so tender and gorgeous and moving. If he continues with performances like that and his brilliant reworking of “Ring of Fire,” he’s going to go all the way.

Ryan Seacrest makes a point of saying that you can buy recordings of the contestants’ performances on iTunes, so I tried to do just that last Thursday. Unfortunately, last week’s performances weren’t available yet. I tried again this morning and they were. But what they are selling is not what you heard on the show. I went directly to the link for Adam’s “Tracks Of My Tears” and when I previewed it… WTF?!? Gone is the simple rhythm section and Adam’s tender vocals. Instead, you get Adam doing karaoke vocals over the original recording’s instrumentals. That is not what I wanted in the song, and given the comments from 587 other fans, not what most people want. Idol pulled this same switcheroo last year with Jason Castro’s performance of Brudda Iz’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” In Jason’s case, however, the tenderness of his singing and his ukulele playing were left intact and you couldn’t really tell it was not the same performance that you saw on the show.

The people who are really upset are those who prepaid for the song. I know I would be too. This should serve as a cautionary tale to anyone who is thinking of preordering any Idol performances in the future. There’s no way I’d pay in advance for anything from Idol now.

By the way, if you’re technically inclined, you can buy the video of his performance that was so beautiful and then rip the audio track into its own mp3 file. That’s what I’m going to do. But you shouldn’t have to do this. Idol should be selling what we heard on the show, not a studio do-over. I don’t have a problem with them also selling the studio do-over, but what people want and expect to get is what they heard on the show.

Usually when I learn a new programming language or framework, I am plagued by the fact that I can’t think of anything to build with it, or I can only think of things that are too difficult. With iPhone development, I have two ideas for apps, both of which should be fairly easy to write. I’ve gotten a good start on the first app, but now I’ve hit a roadblock, and I’ve been stuck here for a while. I thought I’d ask for help.

Obviously I can’t disclose too much of what the app does, since I do eventually want to sell it in the App Store. Essentially, it allows for a very specific type of photo manipulation. I’ve got the basic UI built, and I’ve hooked into the camera framework, so you can either take a new photo, or use one you already took. I am displaying the photo in the main window, currently scaled to fit, but I will eventually add zoom and pan. I have the code written that allows the user to define a region of the photo to work on, by drawing a rectangle or ellipse. I draw the shape using Quartz 2D, which results in a red rectangle or ellipe drawn on top of the photo. So far, so good.

This is where I’m stuck. I need to do “something” to the bits in the photo in the region defined by the rectangle or ellipse and, at some point, a freehand shape. (Obviously I can’t reveal what the “something” is.) So, I have looked through the Quartz 2D docs and am trying to figure out how I can

1. get the bits in the region defined by the user’s drawing
2. swizzle the bits with my secret sauce to produce the desired effect
3. get the swizzled bits back into the photo for display to the user

And here I sit. I have never done anything with graphics before, so this is all completely foreign to me. I can’t see how to do any of those three steps.

The next question, then, is should I be using OpenGL ES instead of Quartz 2D? The iPhone dev book I have taught a little bit of both, and the OpenGL stuff looked far more complicated than Quartz, which seemed like overkill for my situation. I don’t know.

I think I can accomplish what I want by creating an image mask, applying that to my original image, and then displaying the new image, but the mask creation function, CGImageMaskCreate, has me confused. I get most of the parameters, but I don’t understand the CGDataProviderRef parameter. Can anyone offer any sort of pointers to get me moving again? Are there any really in-depth Quartz 2D tutorials? The Apple docs on Quartz that I’ve read are very basic, and don’t really give examples.

Thanks for any help or pointers. I know I haven’t given you much to work with.

I just installed the iLife ‘09 suite, which includes version 8.0 of iPhoto. While I haven’t had time to try out any of the new features, I did check to see if my ExportToArchive plugin still worked. I’m happy to report that it does still work. If you already had it installed, you don’t have to do anything; it will just work. If you don’t have it installed, the installer works with the latest version of iPhoto just fine.

If you encounter any problems using ExportToArchive with iPhoto ‘09, please let me know.

This is a horribly cheesy, yet oddly fun movie starring the wrestler Roddy Piper. It boasts one of the longest, most tedious, fight scenes *ever* in a film. My favorite line features Roddy walking into a bank full of concealed aliens. He walks in and to get everyone's attention, he utters this classic line:

I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I'm all out of bubblegum.