i code therefore i am

A day in the life: [02-27-2010]

2010-02-27T10:22:00.000-07:00

Man, what a week huh?

So, this week was crazy busy at work, and I feel like I have too much to try and recall. I'm getting a cold and feel kind of crappy, but am on a bunch of antibiotics, so hopefully it'll help head it off at the pass.

Lets see. Monday I went to the dentist to see about this wisdom tooth that decided to go south. Says I'm going to have to get it pulled and have root canals done on 2 others as well. Not going to be fun.

Tuesday through Thursday were busy, but blissfully uneventful.

Friday, I got a new computer for M. Hopefully this one will fare better than the last few. Bought it from a smaller shop here in town, from a guy that looked like Robert Downey Jr. in IronMan. It was pretty funny. Today it's hang at the house and clean for a while, until we go get M. from school. Then, happy fun times as we goof off and play for a while.

Woo. Yeah, I feel like there is a whole lot more to add, but can't think of any of it right now.

So until later. Caio!

A day in the life: [02-21-2010]

2010-02-21T19:09:00.002-07:00

So, a weekend in review:

Friday, helped M close up the shop. Live music going on there that night, so it was pretty busy right until close. After closing we went to Perkins for dinner/breakfast food. Afterward we came home and put the guys to bed.

Saturday, hung out with the guys most of the day while M was in classes. Played driver most of the time we were out. Took J to work, took M to school, hung out at home for a bit, went to Costco, went to pick M up from school and take her to the shop, then proceeded to go pick up J from work and get her to the shop.

After all the rabid driving, we ran to the grocery store for a few things that i was unable to get while at Costco. Came back home to get the kids fed and get ready to go out.

M and I went out for the evening. We went and caught a movie and dinner at a pretty swanky place, at least as far as Denver is concerned. In the process, we heard a lot of really odd music and overheard a slew of bizarre conversations.

After dinner we went and caught 'Shutter Island,' which in all was an okay film, though I think that the ending was exceptionally lame. It was fairly disturbing, in some places suspenseful, and in other places just downright predictable. The score was overwrought with exceptionally poor timing and clicks and whistles that only someone in the asylum might love.

After the movie we just came home and slept. That is, after some giggling and detoxing from the crazy.

Which brings us to today. Sunday the 21st.
In all today was remarkably uneventful.

I cleaned house this morning while everyone was chill and hanging out doing their various things (i.e. sleeping, watching a movie, etc.) After that we all had lunch and talked a bit. Following that, the guys went to play and be boys.

M and J went off to the weekly belly-dance class and afterwords are heading up to the shop to clean and meet and things related to work. The kids and I had a friend of A's come over and play video games and talk books and the like with A.

After that we ate and soon are going to get the kids into a shower and off to bed, at which point I'll probably call it a night on the cleaning and the working on other peoples machines and the like and just veg.

Anyway, enough rambling on recaps.
G'night.

[DEV] Introduction to Windows PowerShell 2.0

2010-02-16T23:03:00.000-07:00

So, at my last gig, I had a manager who sang the praises of PowerShell from the rooftops. I didn't get it. I really tried, but I just didn't get it.

Until just this week. I get it now. It's really honking powerful!

You see, I guess I was never in a situation where I could really take advantage of it before, and never really had the time to devote to looking into it with any sort of vigor. Recently however I've had a lot of need for automation and repeatability with some processes I have in place.

That being said, I looked at PowerShell again. I've come to love that which I did not understand.

So in the spirit of sharing and getting people involved, I give you a few links. These have been a boon in getting set up with the latest and greatest version of PowerShell, and getting the understanding needed to really harness it for what it can be used for.

First and foremost, the bits
You'll need to download and install the appropriate version of the Windows Management Framework Core.

The next thing you'll want to get installed is the PowerShell Community Extensions
These are a "useful set of additional cmdlets, providers, aliases, filters, functions and scripts for Windows PowerShell" So sayeth the website. ;)

These extensions add things like the ability to call into ADO for various things, add items into your MSMQ stacks, get and set environment variables, and many other useful things, not provided in the base set of PowerShell cmdlets.

Okay, great, so now you have the toolset installed. Now what?

Right, Never thought you'd ask. Okay, maybe I did. So here is the skinny. What do you want to do? Chances are, it can be done using PowerShell.

Here are a few things to get you going.

Microsoft's Scripting with PowerShell

Windows PowerShell Blog [MSDN]

PowerShell.com - The community for PowerShell people

Now that you have your feet wet, here are a few more links to keep you going.

Variables in PowerShell

Controlling Variable scope in PowerShell

Variables and the PowerShell Pipeline object

Debugging with PowerShell

For those of you who are playing along at home and are ready for more advanced topics, here is something that you all might find interesting. I know these helped me out a lot!

Fundamental Web Testing with Request/Response Testing using PowerShell

Using PowerShell to Post images to TwitPic
This one has some really great examples of how to deal with posting form data to web applications via PowerShell!

Anyway, I'll be posting more later on how to do some basic scripting with PowerShell soon. In the meantime, read up and later we can discuss. ;)

See ya then.

a day in the life: [02-16-2010]

2010-02-16T22:14:00.002-07:00

2-16-2010

Oh wow. Today. Let me tell you it.

So after oversleeping and missing my train, I guess I didn't get off to too bad a start. Had a nice uneventful train ride into the station near the office and a relaxing walk from the station to the office. I realized this morning that the way I'd been walking previously added about 10 minutes to my total time to walk, so I modified my route a little and still managed to squeak into the office at a fairly reasonable hour (for people at my office) and got started with the breakfast of champs, a twix and a mt. dew. Yeah, so totally can't run late anymore. That's a horrible breakfast. I'm not in college anymore!

Anyway, after my lovely breakfast and catching up with my various emails, I got my morning work squared away and started looking at a few higher priority items that got tossed over the wall to me. Nothing too big, just needed attention right then. So, I knocked them out and then went back to looking at the special project that I'm helping out with. I'm assisting another group with testing an application they are trying to roll out and getting up and running for everyone's use. Unfortunately, time has been a little more limited than I'd like, ad I'm sure the other team would like.

So I mostly bounced between things a lot today, and as I was getting ready to bounce to go home, my boss calls and says we have a meeting. Note, it's 5 PM. The meeting wasn't on the schedule. So I stick around and get trained on something, takes about 30 minutes for the "quick" overview and we're cut loose for the day.
It's interesting stuff, but I wish they'd have given us a little more notice.

Anyway, headed home, dropped J off at the house and went up to the coffee shop to get the guys and to talk to M for a bit. Apparently the guys were total nutballs all day today. I don't know what I'm going to do about them. Some days are perfect, but then there are days like today, where nothing gets done and everything apparently stops making sense in their minds. So we split them up for a while and left the oldest to help close up the shop while I took the youngest with me to buy groceries.

While we were at the store T and I decided to get flowers for around the house. Brighten the place up a little bit. It's always so stark and cold in the winter time. I thought we needed a little bit of something to spruce the place up and it would make the girls happy. So I grabbed three bouquets of flowers and brought them home and placed them around the house and it does, it makes the place feel more alive.

After dropping off the groceries and putting flowers up, T and I went back to the shop to pick up A and M and head home for the night. M still had a paper to finish and I needed to get diner cooked. It's spaghetti night!

So home we came. M fixed the red sauce, while I got the rest of the stuff for dinner prepared. Noodles, Salads, Garlic Bread. All of the yummy things that make you come back for seconds or more.

While I was fixing dinner, A was working hard at his school work that he hadn't finished earlier in the day. T had been scrubbing things around the house for use, being really useful as he did. At some point, however, he appears to have wandered off to bed. So once dinner was all ready and I had plates out and was calling people to dinner, we noticed 2 people we not here. Both J and T had curled up and gone to bed. We managed to rouse T, but J just kept sleeping...

After dinner, I tossed the kidslets through various showers and got them shuffled of to sleep. Where I should probably think about heading myself sometime shortly.

So that was my day, in a nutshell.

a day in the life: [02-15-2010] The Birthday Edition

2010-02-15T23:24:00.000-07:00

Monday, I could never really get behind Monday's. It's not that the are particularly bad, I just have a hard time getting going.

This morning was especially hard. it's my birthday and all I really wanted to do was sleep. Hard. I slept a little later than I usually would and got moving a little slower than I usually try to. I took it slow and enjoyed just being this morning. It was a very Zen type of morning. Until I hit traffic. Then my Zen was gone.

Oh well. I'll get there eventually.

So I got to work a little late, nothing too bad, but a little later than normal. Got started on getting the project that had to be out the door today finished up and out. Worked on a few things to try and help simplify a few processes that I have to do regularly.

I tell ya what, if you are in tech and haven't looked at Microsoft's PowerShell, you need to get on that. It's pretty darn slick. I've managed to take something that was taking me far too long manually and turned it into a 5 minute job using a PS script.

Liking that a lot. I owe my old boss an apology for doubting it's usefulness.
So with that. Sorry man. you were right. :)

I have a few things to post on this later. Good stuff and I have a few good things to share as I get all of it wrapped up.

After that stuff I worked on a few special projects that are going on around the office to help out, those are going a little more slowly, but hopefully will pick up some steam toward the end of the week.

After work I rolled over to the coffee shop and grabbed a chai and talked to M for a few. I met the new barista and talked briefly, but they got slammed, so I left and let them do their thing.

Came home for a little while and played some video games with the guys, cause they wanted to "hang out" with dad for a while. Which usually means, "can we play video games while you watch?" or something to those effects. Today I played too, so that we were all doing something somewhat together, as the allure of Memory apparently wore off as they came downstairs. Oh well, I was really trying to play board games first.

After playing a few games with the guys, we got ready and headed back up to the coffee shop to get M from work. We ran out to dinner, after a snafu with the keys to the shop was resolved, and ate a wonderful dinner. We talked and goofed off and generally just enjoyed being.

The kids ended up too hopped up on sugar to stand up straight and were getting a bit silly, so we came home and did the traditional singing of Happy Birthday and eating of VERY SMALL pieces of cake, as to not implode the poor little sugar ridden bodies.

The we sent them off to brush teeth and get ready for bed. Once all that was taken care of, we tucked them into bed and I've been surfing the internets since.

Now, time for meds and beds shortly.
Been a pretty good day overall. Here's to a pretty good year to come.

a day in the life: [02-14-2010] The Valentine's Edition

2010-02-14T23:59:00.000-07:00

So today is Valentine's Day. No hearts and flowers here though. I stayed home today and hung out with my guys. We watched a bunch of Looney Toons cartoons from back in the day and generally burned the early part of the day away giggling madly at Bug's and Daffy's antics. Good times had by all. After the looney toons were done, we made Mommy Valentine's cards. They were adorable. M woke up around 1PM and then we all had our various lunches.

During lunch preperation and after lunch, I worked on something I've been trying to get around to for a few weeks now. I gave M a pedicure. Not the best one I'm sure, but her feet look pretty and thats all that matters in the end. She has pretty red toenails and smooth soft skin. Yay!

After that She and J left to go do thier weekly booty shaking (bellydance lessons) and me and the guys hung out for a little while. Then they ran off to play by themselves for a while, while I proceeded to clean the house. Once the girls got home, we ate some dinner, M studied for a while, the guys played, I cleaned some more, and then we all ate dinner.

Shortly after dinner, both the ladies and A went out to see the Percey Jackson movie. They said it was okay. But I guess I'll wait til video with that less than stellar review.

Me and T played video games and got him through a shower before tucking him into a late bedtime. :)

We had a good evening too. After lil man was in bed I proceeded to finish up some laundry and work on a few misc. little things around the house.

Once the girls and A got home, I pretty much tucked A in and settled in on the couch for the evening, followed by a few video games and a bowl of ice cream. I guess now it's prolly about time for bed.

Good night world.

Tomorrow. birthdays.
Woot.

a Day in the life: [02-12-2010]

2010-02-12T22:00:00.000-07:00

Kind of a lazy day at the office. Had a few tickets go to production, one Emergency fix. Overall though, nothing that was too difficult. That's what I've liked so far. It's been busy, but not overly difficult or stressful.

I don't really feel like there was much to talk about today though. I didn't go out for lunch, I just hit the vending machine. I drank a ton of water. I mostly just stayed at my desk and hammered through stuff.

See my birthday is Monday and I don't really want to have to focus on too much of anything, although I know I will have to, I want to try and minimize the impact that work is going to have on me that day.

Usually I dread birthdays. I see them coming and its like a car crash or a bad movie. It's something that is going to happen and you know its bad, but you can't look away. This year though, I am trying to look at it in a different light and see it as a positive step. I've made it another year and I'm aiming for many more, maybe not just like it, but many more to come.

Tonight I made plans for a babysitter for next weekend when I will hopefully go celebrate my birthday, belatedly, with my wonderful wife and friend M. I also went and had dinner out with she and our kiddos. I'm now trying to fix a friends computer and just chill for a while while M works on her Italian homework. Not the most exciting Friday night, but it'll do.

So yeah, all in all, pretty lightweight kind of a day.

Party on.

A day in the life: [02-11-2010]

2010-02-11T23:07:00.003-07:00

Day 9 at the new job. So far it's been pretty interesting. Good people. Sharp developers, lots of things to do. Keeping me on my toes and really busy. I've been constantly on the go, only slowing down due to checks and balances in place for process control. Unfortunately, it has to be that way for quality, but it's a good thing.

Before you hit me up and ask me, Anything really eventful happen today? I'll go ahead and be right up front with you. No. Not really.

Got up, Showered, Walked to the train station. Harassed K and R, they tried to give me free coffee. I declined. Honestly don't need to feel indebted to that pair.

Yes, I rode the train into the office today. Definitely miss that from time to time, miss getting my reading in and getting a chance to just organize my thoughts , or just sit and be, or people watch.

Today, apparently, there were a few guys from out of town, a couple of mid 40's black gentlemen, though they'd laugh if they heard me call them that, were catching the train this morning as well. I'll come back to it. It's an amusing story.

After my amusing train ride, I walked to work, also uneventful, but a nice brisk 20 minute walk to wake up. Not too far, but in the cold it can be a little much.

Once I got into the office, it was pretty much work, work, work, wash, rinse, repeat.

It was pretty much moles and trolls for the next 180 minutes. Took the new employee been here a week survey, oh wait, no. That was yesterday morning... this morning was just moles and trolls.

Then, did lunch with a colleague. He picked up lunch for me today, I grabbed the tip, told him that I'll catch the next lunch. We caught up a little, was really the first time we've had to talk since he left our last contract together. He's a genuinely nice guy and reminds me a lot of one of my past colleagues and mentors. We talked about how things have been going for him, asked how things were going for me. General conversation about the gig, the family, just good conversation. Kind of odd, considering don't have that many of those with new people.

We ate sandwiches at a place called DeliTech? I dunno. I think perhaps M. said it best. "Sounds like they'd be a place that fixes deli's equipment... not a sub shop."

After lunch we walked back to the office and worked until 5:15 - 5:30-ish, it is at this point that the girls when the girls come to rescue me. Only, the elevators don't work. Doh! To the stairs!! Crap. I have to locate the stairs. Where were those stairs??

Once I found them, it became pretty obviously that someone more than likely had put them out of order to work on them. Unfortunately 6 flights later I'm not as enthusiastic. I run out to the truck, hope in the drivers seat, which J. was vacated, and we rush out, braving the rush hour traffic, which i'd just been informed, was "not pretty"(TM) and off we went!

Once in the thick of things, we made our way back to mi casa... it didn't take too long and we made it in one piece. well, 5 individually wrapped pieces i would rather say. As one piece might be rather uncomfortable and awkward to explain to anyone.

Anyway, i digress.

So, once home, M. and I again venture out to kick her ass into work. Poor thing. :(

Then I return to the house. I ran and checked my email, before playing some xbox games with the kiddos for a while.

After playing for a few, I fix sammiches. By this point it's a bit later than I expected and I'm having to scramble things realize its late and get a grumpy M. face made at me, because I should have done it 30 minutes sooner than I did. But hey, I was hanging out with my guys and I miss being able to do it.

But yes, we all lived.

Once the children had nommed thier dinners, we shuffled them into their various showers and I gave T. his shower, oversaw the daily operation of pajamifacating and tooth brushing that needed to happen and managed to get them shuffled off to their respective beds.

M. is studying for school and I'm not here. typing. so i guess that mostly gets us up to speed.

OOOOOh! except for the amusing guys from this morning. right. so .... Couple of black dudes from the west coast in town working a construction job out past Nine Mile, have no idea how the light rail / bus transfers seem to work. These guys were a trip. Got one one stop after me this morning, talking smack to each other about how the other's "bright idea" has cost them an hour of pay and they're "going to be so late." Apparently they'd caught a bus and it'd taken them to littleton, instead of taking them out to Nine Mile, or they thought they were going to transfer to the rail at a different place, or something. But anyway, they managed to get to the rail, get on going the right way finally and bitched the whole way to broadway. I was amused. As we hit the transfer, one of them started off the wrong way. I happened to notice and let them know they needed to basically follow me if they wanted to have a chance of catching the right train... they were heading off toward the lot, not the next line over.

His buddy ribbed him about starting off on the wrong foot already and then they both wandered over toward the train i was getting on.
They talked casually about cali, and how "the last time I was here..." and made jokes about "Englewoooooood east-side!"

Just seeing how they interacted with each other was amusing. They didn't have any qualms calling each other out, they weren't family, but acted like it.

As i hit my stop, I'm still kind of laughing to myself at their banter, "You know Kelly?" "Yeah..." "Yeah, That girl is Fine! I asked her the other day if she got half naked and danced around and shit. She looked at me and said 'no man, those are belly dancers, I'm Indian' or something. Then she told me she don't get freaky like that. Told me to look up the Kama Sutra so see how she gets down. You ever hear of the Kama Sutra?" "No, don't think so..." "Aw son, let me tell you a thing or two...." Their voices trailed off as the train door sealed behind me and I exit onto my platform to wait on the next transfer.

Small glimpses into other peoples life's make mine a little more real from day to day.

Now to finish Nomming my fries.

I guess for a non-eventful day it wasn't too bad. I seem to be remembering more. I have noticed a down turn in over all mood, I've been rather blue. No real reason. But then, I've always gotten that way this time of year, so maybe its just seasonal. Could be related to the change in dosages in the new meds, or it could just be one of those things. I don't know. Figure it's worth noting.

Issues with VS2005/2008 and debugging IIS

2010-02-06T00:01:00.001-07:00

Ran into a problem at work today with IIS and Visual Studio not playing nice together. Kept getting an error saying something to the effect of the following:

"Unable to start debugging on the web server. An Authentication error occured while communicating with the web server"

There seems to be a few things that can cause this one, I'm going to put them here for posterity.
One is due to local loopback checking. This issue occurs when the Web site uses Integrated Authentication and has a name that is mapped to the local loopback address. Here is Microsoft's fix for it.

In my case I have a local website running and about 17 localhost aliases. This is definitely part of my issue. Still doesn't fix the error.

Next thing on the list is a badly configured version of the .Net 1.1 or 2.0 frameworks. Recommended treatments is to try and reinstall the correct framework version on the box by running the aspnet_regiis.exe -i command, some people recommended going one step further and go ahead and nuke the ASPNET user before completing this step.

If this still doesn't get you around it, there is yet another thing you can look at. This is the one that really tripped me up. In your local IIS settings, there is an HTTP Keep Alive setting, the check box for this setting MUST BE ENABLED for the debugger to properly attach. If you have disabled this to enhance your performance for AJAX/jQuery execution, then you will no longer be able to use the Visual Studio debugger as intended.

Once I reenabled this switch, and reset iis (IISRESET from the command prompt) the issue went away and I was able to debug properly once more.

Hope this helps someone else out there.

Artwork: Stained Glass

2010-01-11T22:00:00.001-07:00

Here is one of the new pieces that came about from tinkering with the backgrounds I was talking about.

A day in the life: [01-10-2010]

2010-01-10T22:00:00.001-07:00

Mostly a wash. The day in general got started badly and on the wrong foot with a misunderstanding between M and I. From there it was a lot of damage control. I fully intended to work on MIXX and to knock out R's UI issues but that apparently wasn't in the cards. I spent all day working on Ball's stuff instead. All day. Like stopped at 11pm. That was my day. Than wound down with some Warcraft.

a day in the life: [01-09-2010]

2010-01-09T22:00:00.002-07:00

Today was a bit of a crazy day. After an eventful evening yesterday, which didn't go anything like I had hoped, today turned out to be busy and I didn't get much in the way o f anything I needed / wanted to do done. it's cool though. The things that did get done were pretty alright and the day as a whole went pretty well.

Lets see if I can recount the day.

Got up with the boys this morning, got them breakfast and the like, and set them up with a movie. While they ate and watched TV, I cleaned, in preparation for the guests that I had just recently been informed that we were going to be having over today. Manda said she'd get it when she got up, but with the fiasco that was last night and the fact that she really needed to get some decent sleep, I just went ahead and got a start on things. So by the time she got up a good portion of what was needed to be done was good to go.

SJ and K stopped in for a bit while they were in town before having to head back south for SJ's show tonight. it was amazing to see them again. I hate that I only get to see them every few months. I miss SJ dearly when she goes. K and I talked potential business stuff for a while in the kitchen while the ladies caught up in the other room. Some pretty interesting ideas floating about. If K will get me specs I might have things there to work on.

A while later, MFT, the really awesome singer/ songwriter that works at the coffee shop with M came by. Unfortunately about this time, K and SJ had to leave us. M was going to read his Tarot for him today, but not without the guys bum-rushing him and trying to steal him away for a while first. And as it was his first time over I felt obliged to try and steal a few minutes too. I like showing off a bit to other musicians too, so I got out my guitars to show him.

Then I took the guys and went to play some video games while M did MFT's cards and such. A bit later, they came back and joined us, we just kind of hung out for a while and chilled. We ended up playing legos with the kids for a while, while just talking and goofing off.

After MFT headed out for his show this evening, we mostly hung out around the house relaxing.
R and A came by a few hours later and stayed most of the evening. J got home from work late and left to go catch a movie, which was apparently awful.

I went and tried desperately to work on a background image to use on the KCM website and unfortunately came up with next to nothing for the application background, but did end up with a few new nifty samples for other pieces.

Had a salad with M and then helped bake pumpkin muffins afterwards.

Had 2 really kind of bizarre nosebleeds today. Out of the blue. real gushers too.

I think I've hit the high points. Tomorrow I'll try and do better about keeping track.

New Artwork

2009-07-16T16:59:00.001-06:00

So, with much patience and some frustrations, the new art is finally all up over at the ImageKind store.

For those in the extremely observant crowd, it's been up for a few days and I've posted a few preview pieces on Facebook and the like, but the sidebar on the left has all of the works, and you can visit the full gallery on ImageKind.

With the release of this last batch I was invited to display my art in two of the featured groups on ImageKind, 'Art for Cancer' and 'HealingArt.' Both of these groups are doing art for a good cause, the former is raising money for cancer research charities and the later is just a group of artist sharing there positive energies to bring artwork they feel has a healing vibe to the group and to a larger audience.

Anyway, I have one piece in the 'Art for Cancer' group for sale, of which 15% of the proceeds will be donated to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. the remainder of the proceeds and the proceeds of all other sales go to the feed Hatdragon and the Family fund. ;-) So, feel free to donate and enjoy the artwork!

Calling All Talent

2009-06-29T16:14:00.001-06:00

So I made the mistake of trying to pull this together on a weekend.Let me try again now that people are awake and on the internet and not partying. ;)

I'm trying to put together a quasi-community posting for all of my creative and talented people, introducing them all to each others works and spread the love at the same time. If all of my artists, writers, musicians, crafters, etc can please send me a way for people to get to their various trades, I'll finish putting my post together and get it out, let's call it Wednesday, and hopefully get some new love for all :)

So, with that, send me YOUR information. I'll collect it all, and get a big, interesting talent-filled together and put it up with what I'd like you all to do then.

Stay tuned.

Progress Report

2009-06-25T14:05:00.003-06:00

So, over the past few evenings, I've been slamming into a brick wall of sorts.

I'm working on the iPhone app pretty much non-stop, and over the past few nights I've been messing with the UITableView and a custom UITableViewCell. This, this has proved interesting. The first evening, the data loaded into my UITableView, but the UITableViewCell never rendered it's contents. I could select a row, I could scroll the table, but you couldn't see what was in them. Night two, was more of the same in a difference manner. Night three was more fruitful. After rewriting the implementation of my UITableViewCell, I ended up getting a background color to at least display for each cell! Woo! Progress. It might now seem like much, but trust me, after two days of fighting with rendering code and having nothing make a difference, it was huge!

So, for those of you following along going, "okay, so, what did you do differently?" Let me try and explain.

In my TableViewController, I have something like the following:



- (UITableViewCell *)tableView:(UITableView *)tableView cellForRowAtIndexPath:(NSIndexPath *)indexPath {
    
    static NSString *CellIdentifier = @"myTask"; 
    
    myTaskCell *cell = (myTaskCell *)[tableView dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier:CellIdentifier]; 
  
    if (cell == nil) { 
        cell = [[[myTaskCell alloc] initWithFrame:CGRectZero reuseIdentifier:CellIdentifier] autorelease];  
    } 
    
    // Set up the cell... 
 myTaskDetail *task = (myTaskDetail *)[self.Tasks objectAtIndex:indexPath.row]; 
 
 [cell setTask:task]; 
     
 return cell; 
}

Well, the first issue I had was that I forgot the cast of (myTaskCell *) on the tableView for the dequeueReusableCellWithIdentifier. That threw off a few things in regards to the call to [cell setTask:task] a little further in.

The next issue was in the myTaskCell code itself. Originally, I was just overriding layoutSubviews and crossing my fingers that everything played nicely. That didn't actually didn't go so well. So I did a little research and found this article at the atebits site. So, with a little bit of modification to the myTaskCell code, I switched to using the overriding drawContentView method and low and behold, I now have a blank cell, which is better than the transparent ones I had 20 minutes prior.

Why is my data not displaying? Well it turns out that the font string that I was using was larger than the cell content and when i reduced it from 20 to 14 it seemed to correct the issue. Wallah, text.



- (void)drawContentView:(CGRect)r  {

...

    normalTextFont = [[UIFont systemFontOfSize:14] retain]; 
    [task.TaskText drawAtPoint:p withFont:normalTextFont];

... 
}

So, mostly just putting this out there in hopes that if I run across it again, I have a quick point of reference, or that someone else is able to find it a little more quickly than I was.

Happy Coding!

Hide and Seek...?

2009-06-23T23:32:00.002-06:00

Where have you been hiding, Mister? Um, yeah. So, I feel like I owe you all an explanation.

Rightly so. Sorry everyone. I've let my audience down. Last time I posted anything was, mid-May? Not a good blogger or social-media head type person, sorry about that guys, I'll try and do better, promise.

So, what, you ask, have I been doing? I've been job hunting primarily. Not having much luck, but this is the way of the market right now. Which leads me to the rest of this entry, the other things I've been doing. ;)

You can't have expected me to sit idle right? So, while not job hunting, I've been enjoying some of my idle time, hanging out with the family, playing with the kids and going to the zoo and museums and the like. I've also started working full steam on a few side projects. One of which I can talk about, one of which I can only hint at.

As you all know, the point of this journal was to document my travels, trials, and headaches as I explored the vast new world that is iPhone development from the viewpoint of a .Net developer. Along those lines, I have begun development on my first commercial development application for the iPhone and I'll be releasing some details about that soon. Along with those details will come more code samples and lessons learned. I haven't forgotten the reason I started this. So stay tuned for more there. There will also be some giveaways for beta test openings for the application to be given away raffle style soon as well.

The other project, while having roots in the open source community is another commercial venture and you will have to get your details and information on it through the official channels I'm afraid. Fun with NDAs. It's pretty exciting and I'm exceptionally pleased to get to work with this awesome team. I've managed to get back into a more formal C++ development role than I've had to maintain in a long time, and I'm enjoying the hell out of the challenges that have been given to me thus far. You all can find out more at AIR:Steampunk, Facebook, MySpace, or follow them on Twitter.

Also, in the next few days, 13 new pieces of art should be hitting the ImageKind gallery for sale. It took me quite a number of hours to get them all finished, polished, refined, and ready for general public consumption, but I think you all will have a good selection of work to choose from now. I like the variety that I will have available on the store once they post. I will have a new post up to announce them formally when I have them up and priced for sales.

Hot Air Balloon

2009-05-10T13:53:00.001-06:00

Hot Air Balloon, originally uploaded by krysklink.

Here is the most recent piece of work I've been toying with. Don't worry. I'm still doing code too. ;)

Just thought I'd share something a little different with you all while I get my head around the first few chapters of the 'Beginning iPhone Development' book by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche.

Playing catchup on that and the iTunes-U classes this weekend and working through a few design issues and what not are on my agenda, but so are a lot of other interesting things, so we'll see what wins out. ;P

Beginnings of an art gallery - An update

2009-04-28T23:34:00.004-06:00

So, the fine folks over at ImageKind are still working on getting the images out to my gallery. Apparently the person in charge of migrating images from the FTP server to the gallery is out sick currently, but will get on it once they are back. I'm hoping this is soon, as I wanted to try and get this up and going a lot sooner than we're looking at right now.

In other news, I'm hoping to have a few more pieces done and ready to send their way shortly. I've been perusing my archives to see what I had stashed away to bring to the table if and when i decided to sell some of my works and have found a few pieces that I think are post worthy.

I've also got a few irons in the fire with regards to the written word, so we'll see what comes of those as well. I'll keep you posted on those as well. Plan for eBooks, possibly print media, but unsure. If print media, lulu.com is a happy happy vendor and I will probably abuse them. ;P

Beginnings of an art gallery

2009-04-20T01:07:00.004-06:00

Okay, so last post I mentioned that you all would start to see non development posts filter in as well. This is the first of such posts. I've started the art gallery page and gotten the starts of a site for it up. I'm still researching the on demand printers to determine the best vendors for such things. As I have more details on that I'll get them to you all, for now you get a sneak peak at the artwork. On the versions that you order the water markings will be removed obviously.

http://www.hatdragon.com/artwork.html

Enjoy!

Tomorrow Comes a Day Too Soon

2009-04-15T18:36:00.005-06:00

"The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails." Wm. Arthur Ward.

Today, I had to adjust the sails.

My work on the iPhone / iPod Touch App still moves forward and it will continue to into the future. I will now also be moving forward on some additional fronts. From here on, you will be seeing other things appear in this space that are not computer or development related, but may still be of interest.

I've been forced into a need to quickly diversify my trades a bit and will be trying to get some art and music work up for sale, as well as my development side of things. My artwork is mostly abstract and my music tends to lean into the experimental and trance genres.

I will now be using this space to showcase my artwork, music, as well as the development journals. I will more than likely be putting the actual works up for sale on places like Etsy or ImageKind.

Watch this space for things to come. Hopefully quickly.

Update: Design

2009-04-10T20:29:00.002-06:00

Working on design this week for the iPhone / iPod Touch application.

I've gotten a good chunk of the requirements hammered out. Hopefully I'll be able to get the UI design fleshed out and figured out next week and get the MVC stuff started. This all hinges on me getting myself through the examples on Core Data either over the weekend or early in the week next week though.

Get in the Ring

2009-04-05T18:28:00.005-06:00

Weekly Recap

So, I've had this post brewing for the past few days, mostly because of the irritation that it's caused me.

I've been torn between being overly technical in my blog or just giving the high level details of my progress during this venture. Unfortunately, I think I'm going to have to be really geeky in here. I wanted to stay pretty high level so most people could follow along, but some things that I've run across this week have vexed me pretty heavily and I feel the need to explain them in depth so that any .Net developer that does try and make this transition in the future has a good point of reference. So, in an attempt to stay at a fairly high level, I'll brush with wide strokes today and see if I can get a somewhat satisfactory post out on what I think is a pretty important topic.

So, This week's recap first and then the meat of the week.

Lots of progress, although a lot of the stuff this week was Xcode interface related stuff.
Tweaks to the IDE.
Tweaks via command line to setup some auto commenting stuff. (if anyone is interested, comment and I'll post more on this one)
Basic tour of the debugger
Basic source file organization with multi-file projects (read, how to deal with REAL applications, not just 'hello world' apps)
Creation and use of my first set of real live classes in Objective-C (lots of interesting cursing to do here ;) See rant to come. )
First real nightmarish roadblock. Objective-C/Cocoa's Boxing and Un-boxing

Get in the Ring - Objective-C/Cocoa's Boxing and Un-boxing

Primitive Type: - Any data types directly supported by the compiler. These map directly to types that exist in the base class library.
Value Type: - Value types are primitive types that are mapped directly to the Framework Class Library. From a memory management standpoint, all value types are stored on the stack.
Reference Type: - Any object type that is not a primitive type. These objects are created on the heap from a memory management standpoint using the new keyword and will return the memory address of the given object.
Boxing: - To be very brief, Boxing is nothing but converting a value type object to a reference type object. Sometimes the .Net compiler will allow implicit conversions for this.
Un-boxing: - Again, in brief, Un-boxing is a conversion of a reference object back into the appropriate value type object. This is typically an explicit conversion.
Auto-boxing: - a feature that some languages provide that will automatically convert primitive types to the corresponding wrapped types and back.

As I said before, I want to try and stay a bit more high level and out of the code examples and the like, but I'll add links to relevant sites if I think they are needed (and they are here.) This particular topic however, bothers me, a lot. See, I went into the Objective-C world from a C# mindset and had put my old C++ development mindset on the back burner. I had put aside things like pointers and memory management and garbage collection. I'd left that world behind and let the framework deal with it for me. I'd just code merrily away and magic would take care of those things for me from now on right? *shakes head* What? Really? I mean, I know better, but I guess I let myself get swept away in it and just didn't really bother with what was going on under the covers.

I left Microsoft do the heavy lifting and I just merrily went along my 'Business Applications Development' way. Most business apps don't need high scale performance tuning anyway. I have people that tell me that if an application runs in an hour that is an acceptable time frame, for a report. *shakes head* Anyway. I digress. So, this week, while going through the motions of learning the new language and creating my first real application in Objective-C, objects were finally needed. Real objects and collections of said objects, but wait. What's this? Boxing and Un-boxing? I... Have to write my own, surely you... really? No... really?

Suddenly, it hits me. I'm not in Microsoft's world anymore. Auto-boxing, doesn't exist here. Objective-C and Cocoa? Yeah. Don't do it. I'm writing real code, in real editors, on platforms that Microsoft doesn't control. I have to do things the old fashioned way. I have to work on writing it all. Not to say it's old fashioned, just to say that I became too self-reliant, or rather too Microsoft-reliant, in this case.

So, with all this in mind, here's what I ran into: primitive types cannot be stashed directly into NSArray or NSMutableArray, you first have to 'wrap' them. They have to be boxed into an appropriate wrapper class, either NSNumber, NSValue, or, I suppose, NSNull, but special cases and what not. There are some objects that will assist you, but mostly you are responsible for handling it all on your own. Anyway. Then, when you want to later use said values, you will have to un-box these values back into the appropriate primitive types.

In the .Net world, the use of value types over reference types is preferred. This is due largely in part to reference types coming off of the heap, which means more to manage in the ways of cleanup in memory management and garbage collection. Whereas with value types, there is less to worry about memory management concerns because it is all based on the stack.

Here, in Objective-C land, it would appear that it's kind of a harder call, you have full control of the memory, so you have the adage from Spiderman to keep in mind 'With great power, comes great responsibility'. I may have to reserve judgment around memory usage until I delve a bit further in on this but, so far, it would appear that the use of value types vs reference types is mostly moot and you just need to be especially careful on your conversion code.

Most .Net developers I know usually take memory management and garbage collection for granted unless they are hard core into performance tuning or are language freaks and want to know everything about the framework. I know about a dozen .net guys personally who wouldn't be able to tell me the answer to "Define [the term(s)] Boxing & Un-boxing as they relate to the languages in the .Net framework." To be honest, until about 4 years ago, I couldn't have cared one way or another myself. It wasn't until I got an application with what looked like a memory leak that I started looking into it.

So, with that said, C# and VB.Net folks, take it to heart: this stuff is important. Learn it now. It will make you more efficient in your current careers. It will make you think about things in more memory-efficient manners or should at least start you down that path. It will also prepare you better for the switch, if you plan on making one. You managed C++ folks doing .Net, you already know all this and I'm just preaching to the choir. Stop laughing at me. ;P

For .Net developers reading along that are interested in learning more about the underpinnings of Boxing and Un-boxing and how it affects you on a day-to-day basis, here are a few good resources. Please, please, please, go read them. It really is important to understand it and it really will help you get to that next level.

http://aspalliance.com/986_Boxing_and_Unboxing_in_NET.1
http://www.dnzone.com/go?377
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc301569.aspx

Progress: Day 3

2009-03-31T15:13:00.004-06:00

IDE Updates:
Okay, so a few of my complaints about the IDE over the past few days have been the multiple windows for everything, no real good way to manage them, no persistence for where windows stay, etc. It's been driving me crazy, like to the point that I've complained to my wife, who also codes occasionally. She's laughed at me. A lot.

Anyway. Since I've complained about this I've done a little bit of research and found that there is a way to get an interface a little closer to what I'm used to. This article on 'Reducing Xcode's Window Clutter' was the answer I was looking for. There is an 'All in One' mode that basically consolidates all of them into a single window IDE with a set of toggle buttons to change your viewpoint. This was a wonderful thing for me. Might not be as big of a deal for non Microsoft developers, but it's made the transition less painful, as the interface seems more similar at this point.

Language Updates:
Now that that barrier is out of the way I've gotten down to some real development. Wow. Talk about some serious differences in syntax. Now that I've moved into looking into more Object oriented programming in Objective-C, we're starting to see the differences appear fast and furiously compared to before.

Some basic differences so far:

Definitions of Enumerations and Structures.
Declarations of Objects
Instantiation of Objects
Use of Objects, Properties, & Methods
Inheritance, Composition and Overloading differences

Later, I'll go into detail about some of these differences.

Overall Updates:
So, overall, I've gotten a pretty good feel for the IDE. I've gotten a pretty good feel for the basic language constructs. I've gotten a pretty good overall feel for the basics. Now, it's onto the intermediate concepts.

Snow Days. ;P

2009-03-28T17:27:00.005-06:00

So, I've taken the past couple of days off. I've been lax in my learning and experimenting in Xcode and Objective-C. See, there's been this blizzard that hit Denver, didn't know if you all heard. So, I've been lazy. That is, when I haven't been shoveling snow, playing with the kids, or listening to amazing music or writers do readings live.

All that being said, hopefully in the next few days, I'll be getting back into the swing of things. Same plan as before, OO concepts next, then something called CoreData which I hear is Apple's happy data access technology, then serious work on design patterns, and then moving on into wiring up UIs to rich objects.

Anyway. Fun stuff. Probably to start back up on Monday. Right. Have a great rest of the weekend guys and gals.

Progress: Day 2

2009-03-26T00:42:00.003-06:00

So, managed to make my way around the Xcode IDE a little bit today. Got in, wrote a few console style applications, all throw away code, but all in the hopes that I would be able to get a feel for the tool. To some degree, I have a better understanding of what is available to me and what I can do with it. This is a GOOD thing.

Tomorrow, I have to take as a downtime day. People coming into town and I must clean and prepare for company, so no coding or exploration can be done. This is okay. I need the mental break anyway.

So in brief summation for today:

Can create new projects
Can write and run said projects
Can set breakpoints and step into code
Can leverage most of the debugging tools, although, a call-stack still seems to be eluding me.

Although, I want to get in and write something with a UI, I am not. This is considered rushing things. I will pace myself.

The goal for Friday is tackling OO concepts in Objective-C and learning the difference in syntax (if any) from C#. So far, language differences have been minor. The ones I've seen so far have been around pointers and memory management / garbage collection. (Imagine that?)

Anyway. Have a great Thursday and I'll see you all back here on Friday!