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March 31, 2006
Smarter crash reports: I give up
A long time ago, before Unsanity released "Smart Crash Reports", I tried to come up with my own version of Apple's crash reporter application. I did this because the existing third-party solutions that I saw looked like horrible kludges. They'd do things like watch for the launch of the Apple crash reporter (polling), kill it so that the window wouldn't bother the user, throw up their own window, wait for the crash report to be written to the disk (again polling), and finally let the user send the crash report.
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Posted by wincent at 8:52 PM
"drukenbatman" gets on the shit list
"drunkenbatman" of drunkenblog.com has just knowingly posted an article which crashes Safari (warning: do not read that article in Safari).
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Posted by wincent at 2:06 AM
March 28, 2006
Involuntary Reboot Log: #38
Lesson of the day, never double-click the application you can find at /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/CHUD/Hardware Tools/Reggie SE. I just made that mistake, out of curiosity, and it hard froze my system. By "hard freeze" I mean that not even the mouse pointer would move, the clock stopped updated, the machine did not respond to pings from elsewhere on the local network, and the only thing that seemed to be working well were the fans (roaring like hair dryers).
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Posted by wincent at 2:38 PM
WONotificationCenter
I've revised my WONotificationCenter class to more elegantly and transparently handle the delivery of notifications to specific threads.
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Posted by wincent at 1:12 PM
March 22, 2006
Automated stripping
Back from the conference. Today's I addressed the one remaining issue in my build chain (previously mentioned here): an automated process to produce release builds with debugging symbols stripped while keeping an unstripped copy locally for the purposes of deciphering crash reports.
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Posted by wincent at 8:05 PM
March 16, 2006
Frustration
Have just spent about six hours trying to track down a bug in my code that was causing a crash in Synergy Advance. Turns out that it wasn't a bug in my code at all, rather it was a misunderstanding of the way NSConnection works.
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Posted by wincent at 3:04 PM
March 15, 2006
Finally
Finally finished that tedious refactoring work I mentioned in my last post.
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Posted by wincent at 7:01 PM
March 14, 2006
All Quiet on the Western Front
Nothing very exciting to report. Now that all the plumbing is done for Synergy Advance's multithreaded Apple Event implementation I am busy doing the refactoring required to make use of the new routines.
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Posted by wincent at 3:28 AM
March 13, 2006
Server reboot
Tonight I rebooted the server for the first time since moving to Rackspace back in August 2005.
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Posted by wincent at 3:09 AM
March 11, 2006
DSTROOT, install_name_tool and Interface Builder palettes
Yesterday I was working on getting WinSwitch up and running as a Universal Binary. One of the hold-ups has been that a couple of the frameworks that WinSwitch depends on, WOBezel and WOHotKey, have been under heavy development as part of my work on Synergy Advance. This required some changes to WinSwitch to get the whole thing back into a buildable state.
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Posted by wincent at 1:26 PM
March 10, 2006
SmartSVN
After trialing it for about a week I purchased a license. It mops the floor with Xcode's Subversion support and allows me to do version control operations much faster than I could in the terminal.
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Posted by wincent at 3:29 PM
March 9, 2006
NSConnection weirdness
Today I present an episode in the Great Mysteries of Cocoa series.
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Posted by wincent at 2:52 PM
NSInvocation and NSMethodSignature and variable arguments
So what happens when you try to use NSInvocation and NSMethodSignature with methods that accept a variable number of arguments?
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Posted by wincent at 2:45 AM
March 8, 2006
Unit testing multi-threading classes
It's proving tricky to write unit tests for all these thread-related classes I've been working on lately. The problem is that the whole testing model pretty much makes the assumption that tests will run on a single-thread, and my mock object implementation isn't flexible enough.
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Posted by wincent at 2:28 AM
March 7, 2006
WOQueueConsumer
So the other day I wrote WOQueue, a thread-safe, multi-processor-aware FIFO (first-in-first-out) queue class.
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Posted by wincent at 3:52 AM
March 5, 2006
Threading niceties for Synergy Advance
The most common thread paradigm is the following:The main thread spawns a worker thread to handle long-running processing tasks in the background. While the worker thread is labouring away the main thread keys the user interface responsive for the user.
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Posted by wincent at 4:51 PM
March 4, 2006
Apple Event "idle functions"
So I had implemented an Apple Event "idle function" in Synergy Advance so that it would remain responsive to the user even when iTunes blocked and refused to respond to Apple Events (as it does when its preferences window is open, for example).
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Posted by wincent at 4:26 PM
March 3, 2006
Xcode's Subversion support
I've been using Xcode's built-in Subversion support for a long time now. Today I realized that lately I have been doing all my interaction with Subversion via the command line, even though I have the support turned on in Xcode.
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Posted by wincent at 3:03 PM
March 1, 2006
Nil vs nil
I was just browsing the Objective-C documentation and I noticed something interesting for the first time.
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Posted by wincent at 1:35 PM
