The Houston Roller Derby is starting up their 2009 season this weekend at Kicks Indoor.  The doors will open at 6pm, the bout will start at 7pm this Saturday, and the after party will be at the new venue (we have to break it in right).

Here’s a note from Scarlet O’Hurtya (twitter):

I hope everyone is as excited as all the skaters are! Our season officially kicks off in 4 DAYS!

Do you have your tickets? Have you invited all of your friends, coworkers, and random people you may run in to? We sure hope so!

$12 Tickets will only be available until this Friday- after that, you’ll have to hope space is left and buy them at the door for $15. Save yourself the $3 and the anxiety by purchasing your tickets in advance and use the leftover cash to buy something at the game (merch, beverage of choice, etc.)…

Oh, and FYI, in addition to music from Beryl Grady, halftime will also feature a corndog eating contest presented by Miramax in promotion of their upcoming release, “Adventureland”.

5 lucky contestants (ideally 1 fan representing each team, 1 Machete Bettie Rec League representative and a 1st time derby attendee) will have 2 minutes to devour as many corndogs as possible. The winner will receive some cool stuff from Miramax and of course the admiration of rollergirls and fellow crowd members alike. I know you’re getting hungry just reading this…

We look forward to seeing everyone at the game! Come early! Bring friends! Bring family! Bring your coworkers! Bring anyone in favor of having a fun time!

Remember, the afterparty will be held at our venue, Kicks indoor (they have a full bar).

Saturday Saturday Saturday!!

Much Love,
-Scarlet O’Hurtya
#20

Do you remember when Apple announced its iPhone?  It had to file with the FCC, so it was going to become public 6-months in advance.  They pre-announced to keep control of their message.  They held a lot of cards to their vest, and it wasn’t really clear what functionality was actually available until the summer release.

Do you remember when Palm announced their upcoming Pre?  It was like a hullaballooed product release at CES.  It was so patently obvious (to anyone familiar with the technologies) that their wasn’t a lot of there there.

There was so much overreaching of claims by one major investor (trying to stoke more investment?) that it required an official SEC filing of facts. (source: AppleInsider – in sore need of copy editing, but an excellent article).  They now even claim it won’t be a direct competitor to the iPhone.  So, not good for Internet or games?

Indeed, AppleInsider contends that Palm is precariously positioned, and I wholeheartedly agree.  I think they will need a drastic influx of capital to finish and maintain development of the vapor platform they presented the world.  And this isn’t the most ideal economic environment for that to happen.

I recently left my internal enterprise programming position at ambulance manufacturer Frazer, located in southwest Houston. I am now currently working with FlipSide5 on iPhone application development. Two of the main guys there are old NeXTstep programmers I worked with at FannieMae in the mid 90s and in a software development tools company, Inline Software, in the late 90s.

They are both based in Northern Virginia. I am, of course, in Houston. Though I will be traveling out there for a week to do some work and reconnect with Mike and Mike. I may be head-down in the code so much that I don’t get to revisit the city of Washington that I lived in for two years. But hopefully I get that chance soon.

And, in honor of a new job making crumbs, I give you They Might Be Giants:

Since the meme was unimplored, and it somewhat amused me, and it was totally random and adequately non sequitur, I share with you my album cover:

Ancient Orient Museum

even in his silence…

And FYI:
a museum in tokyo
Stanislaw Lem

I followed the directions from my friend Peter’s post. My modification being that I didn’t photoshop it:
Continue reading

There are many better ways to trace through your code in any environment than with print statements.  If there’s not, you need to change jobs (or convince them to choose an environment that won’t waste all your time chasing bugs).

Your first order of business should be to familiarize yourself with your debugger.

However, there are times that you want to track through the code without having to break.  Watching what is going on in some event code is a good example.

You may often want to print out what method you are executing when in Cocoa Touch (or plain Cocoa for that matter).  If you are new to the iPhone and/or Objective-C you may not be aware of the two “silent arguments” that get sent to every message that dispatched in the Objective-C runtime.

You can think of the methods as C functions that receive all the arguments you see in the Objective-C code, plus two others.  The first is self, which you should be familiar with.  You may have thought it was a language keyword with supernatural powers.  In reality, it is the first argument to your method.  It’s always named self, and it’s of type id – i.e. it can be any kind of object.

The other is a selector, which is type SEL. It is named _cmd, and just like self you can use it anytime you’re inside a method. Though the preceding underscore should give you a hint that it’s use is expected only in uncommon circumstances.

All this is a long walk back to the point. If you want to print this information out, rather that retyping every method name, and mistyping them, and not changing them when the names change, and copy-paste-erroring all over the place, you can have cleaner and more maintainable code using the _cmd value.

A SEL is not an object, it is an opaque type. So we’ll need to convert it into something we can print. There’s a nice “function” defined for that.

Some example uses:

NSLog(@"[%@ %@]", [self className], NSStringFromSelector(_cmd));
NSLog(@"%s: [%@ %@]", __FILE__, [self className], NSStringFromSelector(_cmd));
NSLog(@"%s %d: [%@ %@]", __FILE__, __LINE__, [self className], NSStringFromSelector(_cmd));

Of course the first example won’t tell you what file it’s in. You may have a subclass instance running through a superclass’ code. If you really want to know the file or the line number, the later examples show you how to take advantage of the C precompiler values to do that.

There are a variety of other uses for selectors. Objective-C’s dynamic dispatching can allow some very powerful behaviors with them. But that’s for another day.

Note: [object className] is not defined in the iPhone on-board library.  You’ll have to replace the [self className] with NSStringFromClass([self class]) for it to run natively on the iPhone OS.

Spring is already on show in Houston.  A particularly warm day in February brought out the wood sorrel, which hangs around for a few months, showing itself on warm days.  There are so many species of Oxalis that I’m not even going to attempt to identify this one.  It does much better in the parts of the yard that don’t get as much foot traffic.