The garbage collection system introduced to Objective C 2.0 with OS X Leopard has recently been released under the Apache v2 License. The garbage collector is designed to be generic and applicable to other language environments. ( via bbum )
After falling head over heels for the ATP stage roster, and having my mind blown by Shellac at Primavera this year, It took me about five minutes to sign up for this Halloween show, in London with Shellac headlining. Literally five minutes, the serial numbers on my tickets were #00002 and #00003.
Held at the Kentish Town Forum , which I think used to be the Town and Country club, a venue I was last in to watch the final incarnation of Green On Red in something like '91. Nothing much changed about the place, and I was quite happy to note that there was plenty of milling around room at an event which I think was sold out, indicating a sane crowd capacity limit, a novelty for a London venue.
A varied lineup of bands, the evening kicked off with Lightning Bolt , an outfit I know very little about. Apparently they played from the stage floor, surrounded by the first 500 punters in the queue. Followed by Pissed Jeans a band I narrowly missed seeing at Primavera , but am moderately curious about them, chiefly due to their revolting name. Sadly I didn't show up until just after they'd finished their set this time, as well. Perhaps I am fated never to see them play.
There was a nice atmosphere for the themed night. The crowd was mostly dressed up in halloween garb, plenty of monster makeup and fake blood and wounds. Some of them seemed scarily over-refreshed to me, at least for such an early point in the evening. There were monster mannequins propped up about the place, and model ghouls with flashing eyes suspended over the stage. Most of the bands had gone to great lengths with their fancy dress. Mrs. S. was wearing bats in her hair, but I'm afraid that I let the side down somewhat, opting merely for some magnificently spangly silver glitter shoes.
First act up after we arrived were Wooden Shjips , who played agreeably spacy drony krautrock, which managed to keep my interest through to the end of their set, always a good sign for that style.
They were followed by Om , who I find marvellously impressive. They didn't seem to feel the need to dress up at all, but this was perhaps mitigated by the fact that their doomy Sabbath sludge metal stylings rather suit the spooky halloween monster vibe without them having to try any harder than usual. The most fascinating thing to me about Om is just how much of a great metal-ish sound they manage to summon up as a duo - just a Rickenbacker bass, vocals, and a tricksy drummer. My attention did wander on occassion, but when I found myself locked into their ponderous form of groove, it was quite captivating. And unlike in Spain, they were all finished by 10 p.m. so I managed to enjoy the full set this time. Exciting Om-related news that reached my inbox just before I set out for the show. Sleep are to reform for a show at ATP:Fans strike back next May!
Les Savy Fav next, a band I find okay on record, but who have a 'must see' reputation about their live show. They kicked off with a tableaux involving a plague of zombies on stage, battling the band dressed as cops. It was a tad confusing, with plenty of dry ice, but I suspect the cops were overcome, and they then kicked off straight into their set as zombie cops. I can see why they have their live reputation; Tim Harrington is a very unusual looking frontman, and his stage antics are high-energy and engaging, plenty of clambering around the rigging, clothes shredding, fake blood and protracted sojourns into the audience for mass singalongs. Overall, I found them a bit murky-sounding and unconvincing for me.
Shellac of course played a fantastic set. The vocals were a bit muffled, mostly down to Steve's comprehensive home-made mummy outfit, his entire head was wreathed in bandaging. Backing vocals were also indistinct, yet marvellous, Bob was styled as a Frankenstein's monster-type character, and performed the entire set firmly in character, all his vocal parts were strangulated-larynx monster grunting and zombie moans. Very amusing. I think he even performed an onstage Q & A much like they did in Spain, but kept to this completely unintelligible delivery. And Todd was a superbly convincing vampire, with plenty of finely judged cape theatrics and hissing. Shellac are superb, and are still my favourite live band. Go and see them as soon as you can.
I can't provide any photos, sadly. In the only negative note of the whole evening, my camera was pinched by some idiot. I think it most likely was pilfered while I was on the night bus back to the hotel, as I wasn't really paying close attention to my belongings by that point. In consolation though, the camera-lifting idiot didn't get the essential proprietary cabling and charging cradle necessary to make their new toy useable, and I got to pick up a new camera the next day from one of the gadget megashops on TCR. I quite fancied an upgrade anyway. Plenty of photos from the show from others , on Flickr.
What could turn out to be only the third known photograph of Robert Johnson , recently surfaced on ebay according to this engaging Vanity Fair feature.
Ever wondered what your most used shell commands are? Here's a very silly way I knocked up to find out mine.
history|perl -anle'$C ++;END '|head -10
Some people would have you believe that perl is difficult to read.
The banjo is a versatile instrument with many uses. Occasionally it is handy during brain surgery.
David Cross was in the New Pornographers promo video for 'Use It.' When I went to see David Cross curate his cabaret show last year in London, one of the acts presented was Kristen Schall , who showed a film from her ongoing 'Penelope Princess of Pets' series. Now TNP have a video for Mutiny, I Promise you, featuring Penelope Princess of Pets.
It's all linked. I henceforth predict the Flight of the Conchords will support the forthcoming A.C. Newman tour.
Kate was right, that's clearly a cardboard theremin. Not often you get to say that.
If you have a Django 1.0 deployment configured to use sqlite3, and are struggling to understand sporadic eruptions of what are clearly exceptions thrown by closing a database cursor with uncommitted work; either manage.py commands on the shell, or page requests to the application generate stack traces centered around messages like ' Unable to close due to unfinalised statements ' then it might be a file permissions problem.
In my case, neither my developer shell account, nor the user id of the running apache httpd processes had write permissions to the directory with the sqlite3 database file. Not immediately apparent from the wording used in the error messages.
The upcoming release from A. C. Newman, will be 'Get Guilty', out on 20th January.
I have some Objective C classes that I've built for use in a project. They are model and utility classes, and have no direct UI responsibility. To aid in automated testing and debugging, I've built them as a project that creates a static library. The project has a test target that runs suites of automated unit tests, and a library target that builds a C-style static library archive binary. The install configuration of this target copies the library to $HOME/lib/ , and the class headers to $HOME/include/$LIBNAME.
This way when I use these classes in another project, I can just #import the headers in the sources, add the static library to the project frameworks list, add the include and lib directories to the compiler and linker search paths in the XCode target inspector, and build as normal. Build times are reduced, base classes are frozen in a stable, well tested implementation, code re-use is easier, everybody wins.
Recently I broke this happy pattern, a little perplexingly, with what I thought was a fairly innocuous piece of refactoring. I noticed that one of my classes was rather a simple set container, and its implementation really little more than a thin wrapper around NSMutableArray , with only a trivial specialisation of behaviour. As it was only used within a parent class structure, with no interface outside the library innards, it seemed a bit of overkill to have it implemented as a sizeable class. The special behaviour really boiled down to maybe two additional methods on top of the normal array interface.
I first refactored it to be a subclass of NSMutableArray, but that actually introduced more complexity. NSMutableArray is implemented as a class cluster , with an abstract API around a private hidden shadow class. In order to subclass it, you are expected to provide your own implementations of a subset of its interface. In my case, this would have made for more code than the class I was trying to replace.
Of course, Objective-C allows you to define categories on any existing classes. Categories allow you to formally define and implement additional methods onto an existing class definition at compile time. I could re-implement my class as a tiny category on NSMutableArray, removing lots of my code, and reducing the size of my library footprint and perhaps add some value by introducing NSMutableArray's extensive interface.
Surprisingly, it wasn't plain sailing. Coding up the category, and tweaking the library to use NSMutableArray in place of the now-redundant class was straightforward. Once the updated code passed the original test suite, it was deployed as a library. The first time I built a project using it, it crashed on startup, with an unhandled exception. I cleaned all targets and rebuilt. Same problem. I checked the library headers to confirm that the new data structures were properly defined on include. No problems there, but still a hard crash on initialisation.
The system logs had an entry for the crash; selector not recognized attached to symbols that were recognisably the new array methods from my category. Running 'nm' against the library file showed the symbols present, and correctly defined as a category on NSMutableArray. I was stumped. After a bit of googling, I came up with the correct solution.
It turns out that in order to link against a static library that contains Objective C categories, you need to pass the linker a special flag, '-ObjC'. Adjusting the build settings of my project to include this flag in the 'Other linker flags' entry of the target inspector fixed it so that the symbols are correctly resolved at runtime. Here is the official word, Technical Q&A QA1490.
For the benefit of anyone else who missed the memo, Pulitzer Prize winning stripper, Berkely Breathed is back in the funny pages with a syndicated Sunday slot. Set back in Bloom County , with a mostly familar cast, with the mildest focus shift to centralising around the escapades of the titular waterfowl. It's readable online at Salon.com , although sadly there's not a feed, so you may need to schedule a reminder of your own.
Economic tailspin, leg-warmers, tired, bloated government set on self-destruct, jingo-tastic US presidential campaign underway, and Bill The Cat! The 80s are most definitely back.
The next iteration of maemo will include cellular connectivity. Hopefully without reducing the battery life.
Apple released iTunes version 8 this week , which introduced some excellent new features , such as Genius playlists, but broke the fancy perl script that I wrote to rotate my music library on my iPod touch.
While revisiting this, I took the opportunity to re-implement it, aiming to fix a few of it's faults, most specifically the terrible performance. I decided to use Python this time around, chiefly because of the existence of appscript , an apple event bridge with a nice syntax. Python's object and sequence semantics are a slightly better fit with AppleScript's data models, and appscript should be a more optimal solution than Mac::Glue for sending lots of messages iteratively.
I've also improved the actual command recipe, using 'duplicate' rather than 'add' to build the playlist seems more efficient. Also the overhead of having to periodically build glue modules with the ' gluemac ' tool is removed. Sadly appscript isn't shipped with OS X, but installing it ( at least on Leopard ), is as simple as ' sudo easy_install appscript '.
The concept behind the tool is the same : use a nominated playlist to synchronise the albums with the iPod, and pick a random set of albums from buckets organised by album rating. Currently it's set to shuffle in 10 '2 star' albums, 20 'three star' albums, and 30 'four star' albums, selected from a 'just music' smart playlist that filters the master library, removing all spoken word, and podcasts and other miscellany from the pool.
Here's the source . I'm far less experienced at python than I am perl, so I wouldn't claim it was a particularly idiomatic solution. It does run many times more quickly than the perl / Mac::Glue solution, taking a minute or so, rather than the best part of an hour. I would put all the performance gains down to the AppleEvents bridge , appscript interface, and using more efficient apple event set operations, rather than iterating over individual data.
As rumoured, it seems that Carl Newman is working on a second solo project . Fingers crossed, hoping there will be a UK tour to support it.
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.
