Phil "Boring" Schiller
On Schiller as Apple's new public face, an Atlantic Station smoking ban, hammock camping, and Alaska photos that may or may not arrive. A few quick, opinionated notes.
Topic
tech
A collection of 201 posts
Linkers
A week lost to Node.js C++ add-ons, node-gyp, and linker behavior, learning the hard way that linkers only pull the object files they think they need. The fix lived in force_load and an Xcode-settings hack, captured in one binding.gyp file of pure suffering.
D-Link Life Expectancy
My D-Link switch started refusing to route packets every few days, which is a problem for a packet-switching device. After an RMA process that wanted proof of purchase on a lifetime warranty, I just bought a NETGEAR instead.
Getting and Setting a File's Extended Attributes
One last code snippet: getting and setting a file's extended attributes on OS X, wrapped in ARC-dependent Objective-C around setxattr, getxattr, and listxattr. Pass in an NSString or NSData and go.
OS X Computer Name and Local Host Name
Two Objective-C functions for reading a Mac's computer name and local host name out of the SCPreferences file. The docs say to lock the file first; I never could, and I suspect that's a root-only trick.
Human Readable File Size & Duration
Objective-C for turning a byte count into a human-readable file size (Finder-style, powers of ten), plus helpers for formatting durations as hh:mm:ss.sss from milliseconds or a pair of timevals.
Sparkle Automation with Xcode 4
Adding Sparkle for automatic updates is mostly painless, but each release means code signing, XML edits, and zipping. Here's a build script to automate the whole Sparkle publish step in Xcode 4.
Mission Control v1 = Spaces v0.5
Everyone praises Mission Control after admitting they never really used Spaces. But Spaces gave you two extra dimensions of spatial organization, and Mission Control flattened all of it into a single line. Kid's stuff.
Spot Programmer Failure
The Spot Messenger app was acting up, so I hit logout. Hitting login got me: you need internet access to log in. So the everything-is-better-with-butter-and-bacon message, and every one after, died at 11,200 feet.
Talkative Little Peripherals
I set up Cacti to graph traffic from my Airport Extreme, and now I'm staring at a mystery: every night from 6pm to 7am, wireless traffic holds rock-steady at 60k/sec. To where? To what? I'd really like to know, and 6pm is right around the corner.
