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Some advice for when you’re debugging code using the whizz-bang, illustrated debugger in XCode 3, and suddenly find that none of your breakpoints are triggered. XCode forgets all your breakpoints! Even plain breaks at line numbers disappear when you hit “Go”. You may have some, or even all, of the following symptoms.

• The little blue indicators in source view just turn yellow (for ‘pending’) when the debugger loads your executable, and never go blue again.
• The tickbox for ‘Use’ in the debugger breakpoint list view, turns to a dash for half-checked.
• Attempts to set symbolic breakpoints which used to match multiple symbols don’t match any symbols.
• “break info” in the gdb console doesn’t list anything.

If you’re anything like me, you might be muttering loudly by this point, and perhaps banging things. Cleaning the entire project, and rebuilding all the dependencies doesn’t seem to help. Nonetheless there may yet be hope! In my case, setting the debugging option ‘Load symbols lazily’ to off, magically fixed things again. This setting is found in the IDE preference pane - XCode -> Preferences -> Debugging .

As hinted in my last post, we’ve recently spent a week away. Visiting with Judi and Jonathan in Normandy in their ongoing barn conversion, failing to construct a goat-shed, appreciating unusual motor vehicles, hanging in a yurt, eating great food, drinking French beer, enjoying good company, and marvelling in some simply astonishing weather.

1. Locate crickets by listening carefully to the sounds of chirping
2. Use a nearby internet terminal to research what they most like to eat. (Iceberg Lettuce !?)
3. Construct a cunning trap around fresh bait
4. Wait for crickets, carefully and very quietly

Trap designs that were tried, and rejected.

1. A basket propped up by a bent twig, connected to twine for rapid deployment.
2. An impromptu fishing-rod, baited with carrot peelings, dangled temptingly over a basket.
3. A pit trap, concealed by woven grass and twigs.

A few weeks ago, I had a day out in the country, by way of a stag ‘do’ for Mr. Mark Webster, whose nuptials are imminent. The main event was a piss-up in a brewery ; for a while the organisation looked sketchy enough to bring life to the hoary old cliché, but luckily enough everything came together right at the final hour, and all proceedings went swimmingly.

As a warm up to the main event, we spent the afternoon clay shooting courtesy of Avago entertainments. My nerves, already twisted by a long minibus drive, the rented bus an antique with a hundred and fifty thousand on the clock, the driver a first-timer, who kept commenting that he found the vehicle strange to drive as it had no brakes, I was feeling rather jumpy about spending the rest of the day discharging firearms. Luckily, just as we pulled up at the venue, I discovered my fears were all misplaced. We would, in fact, be laser shooting.

Effectively it is laser tag. The ‘guns’ are real deactivated shotguns, equipped with an infra-red sensor and transmitter. They communicate with the CPU in the scoreboard unit via a wireless network. The ‘clays’ are in fact miniature frisbees,covered with reflective stickers. You flick a switch to load your gun with two ’rounds’, and if the gun receives a reflection back when you pull the trigger, it records a hit. The base unit plays sampled sound effects in sync to represent rounds fired and breaking clays, in the case of a hit. A small LED within the gun’s sight flashes red or green to indicate a failure or success immediately after each shot.

It’s a more effective system than I’d have predicted, and thus surprisingly good fun. The guns come across as accurate, and the full weight reinforces your suspension of disbelief. I found a real sense of development, in that I managed to improve measurably as the day wore on, and I accumulated practice, although I was suddenly, shockingly poor at the game where you had to pick up your gun from the floor, sight and fire while the clay was in flight. The event was well run, with a considered graduation of difficulty moving up from practice rounds, through to scoring, with enough changes in setting and rules to keep interest keen all the way through to the end of the session, where points were tallied, and the top scorers compete in a final shoot-off. I missed the cut, mostly due to the aforementioned speed round. Overall it’s an absorbing afternoon’s entertainment, and good value. I’d recommend it if you’re looking for something to do with an appropriately sized group for around half a day or so.

It seems like the iPhone 3G has been another smash hit. Certainly here in the UK, with pretty universal 3G signal coverage, there’s lots of interest, and the handsets are selling out as quickly as they come into stock. Several people I know who waited out the first generation immediately signed up for the 3G edition.

Responses to the new platform seem mostly positive, although there’s already some mild grumbling seeping through across the web. There’s more software glitches, unsurprising; given the rush of new third-party applications there’s countless potential software combinations interacting in unpredictable ways. The new units eschew the metal casing of the original iPhone, for a return to possibly scratch-prone iPod plastic. 3G mode depletes the battery rapidly, just as Apple said it would, when they justified their initial transport choice of GPRS/EDGE. The camera is unimproved over the first generation (although I have always been rather impressed with the iPhone camera. For a phone, with no flash it takes great photos, a textbook-worthy example of why it’s nothing to do with the megapixel count)

So maybe it’s not the holy grail of portable devices. It’s certainly not for me. I don’t like the idea of being locked to a single phone company. I don’t want a smartphone that can’t be used as a 3G modem - I’ve grown too used to being able to connect a variety of devices up to the net, using USB / bluetooth or even infra-red links. It’s a little big for my idea of a phone.

As a portable, internet connected, media player cum tablet, it can’t be beaten. The mobile browser is immeasurably better than any others I’ve used. The iPod, photo, and movie playing is slick, and the iPod + iTunes combination still the best available digital music library implementation. The straightforward syncing of contacts and calender information beggars belief (at least for Mac users, such as myself ). Thrown in a few simple PIM applications, ebooks and games from the Application store, and you’re looking at a compelling platform.

Of course, you can get the majority of this behaviour in the iPod touch. Smaller and lighter than it’s phone siblings. Metal back. iPhone-trouncing storage capacity (up to 32GB). Runs the same operating system and applications, same beautiful interface. No contract. The downside being that you can only use it as an internet device over WiFi, which means you need to be tethered to a hotspot. Except it doesn’t mean this at all.

There’s a simple recipe to open up the iPod touch’s internet capabilities to something much closer to the iPhone.

1. Arrange a 3G phone+data connection with the phone provider of your choice. I use T-mobile , I’m very happy with the service.
2. Choose a phone handset, with a high speed modem capability. Make sure you get a model with WiFi . I have a Nokia E51 . It’s lovely. Depending on your phone contract terms, you may get this as a freebie.
3. Configure your phone to act as a WiFi hotspot, using something like WalkingHotspot
4. Join your iPod touch with your phone’s WiFi network. Enjoy 3.5G connectivity on the go!

Of course it’s not a drop-in replacement. You don’t get an in-device camera or GPS, although you may have these in your phone. You do get to spread the battery load between two devices, one with the big screen and multimedia capabilities, another with the data transmission hardware. Although WiFi use will run down your iPod battery faster, you might still find that this combination outperforms an iPhone 3G.