tech

The one executive at Apple who can consistently take an exciting, world-changing product and introduce it with the world's most boring half hour monologue -- is supposedly becoming the "public face" of Apple. I thought Tim Cook was smarter than that. I look forward to reading

My home network has had at its center a D-Link switch for a year and a half now. Recently it has started failing every few days - refusing to route any packets until it was rebooted. Considering the value of a packet-switching device that refuses to route packets, this was

One last code snippet.... This'll let you get and set the extended attributes on a file in OS X. It uses setxattr() / getxattr() / listxattr(), but it's all wrapped up in ARC-dependent Objective-C. When setting a value you can pass in either an NSString or an NSData.

On OS X your computer name and local host name are stored in a preference file - accessible via SCPreferences. In a recent project I needed these values. The following two Objective-C functions are what I'm using. The excessive error reporting was really only necessary while I was

Here's a little Objective-C code for creating a human-readable file size given a quantity of bytes. If you're not using ARC this'll leak memory. It's roughly modeled off the behavior of the Finder - that is, no more than two decimal places;

I added Sparkle, for the first time, to a project. Sparkle is the (fairly) painless way to add automatic updating to a program. However, for security, there are a few steps you must take each time you want to publish an update - like code signing, xml changes, zip'

Numerous reviews and personal comments on Lion have indicated how amazing Mission Control is. Most of these authors precede their praise by admitting, almost proudly, "I never used Spaces much." Spaces added two extra dimensions to the traditional two-dimensional desktop. It was glorious. My work, my windows, my

So, the Spot Messenger iOS app on my iPad was acting up a bit. Not sure what else to try, I hit the "logout" button, thinking that would let me "start from scratch". When I hit "login", the app informed me that, "you