*Coder Blog

MacSanta has been bringing popular Mac software from indie developers to your stocking this year, and Gaucho Software is joining in on the fun.  Save 20% when you purchase Seasonality or Dash Monitors today, just in time to watch that big storm slamming the Eastern U.S. with rain and snow…

Since many of you are offline during the weekend, enjoy the same 20% discount tomorrow too!  Just use coupon code MACSANTA07 when checking out from the Gaucho Software Store.  After that, you can save 10% through December 31st by using the coupon code MACSANTA07TEN.

Happy Holidays!

It’s been almost two months since I’ve posted here, so to avoid the risk of this blog becoming a dinosaur, I thought I would post an update.

Katrina and I returned from our 6-7 week road trip in the beginning of July. We drove out to California at the end of May, and stayed with family for several weeks (also hitting WWDC, of course). On the way out there, we took the northern route, hitting Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone, the Tetons, and the Salt Flats. On the way back, we started in Santa Monica and drove Route 66 all the way through St. Louis, taking the freeway the rest of the way home after running out of time. We’ll have to drive the rest of Route 66 from St. Louis to Chicago sometime soon. Overall, it was quite a trip. Watch my Flickr stream for photos of the trip.

Been working on finishing up DynDNS Updater 2.0, which will hopefully be ready soon. The app is looking pretty good. A lot of smaller details have been improved upon since beta 5, that collectively improve the application quite a bit.

Trying to spend some time working on Seasonality’s international forecast as well. I’ll post more on this at a later point in time, but I’ve created some cool imagery and animations that I’ll be using to tweak the forecast generator to make it more accurate.

C4 is coming up this weekend! I’ll be taking off for Chicago tomorrow for a weekend of Indie fun. I’ll be showing an entry for the Iron Coder Live contest…which reminds me I still need to fix a bug or two there. Should be a blast. I’ll most likely be keeping my Twitter feed up to date more than posting here about stuff.

Speaking of Twitter, I started Twittering (is that a word?) a few months ago, and I’m hooked. If you don’t know, Twitter is a place to post Tweets, which are short bits of text (no longer than 160 characters), usually telling others what you’re up to. My first thought was how much time I would be wasting by doing this, but the whole idea is that posting a Tweet is supposed to be really quick. It provides some nice breaks throughout the day, and the community building around the site is pretty amazing. Check out my Twitter page, and if you’re interested, sign up and start using Twitter yourself.

That’s all folks…

Logtar tagged me with a meme to post 8 Random Facts about yours truly. These are things that most people don’t know about me, so I thought it would be pretty fun. So, off we go…

• I have visited over half of the 50 states in the U.S., but I’ve never left North America. I’m hoping to change this soon.
• I had an opportunity to go on a 35 mile backpacking trek in the Sierras back during my early teen years when I was in scouts. Hiking past the tree line up to 14k feet where there is snow, even in the middle of July, was really damn cool.
• I’ve broken my nose while bodyboarding (face first, right into the sand in shallow water).
• I’ve broken my head while mountain biking… Took off a jump and bit it hard. Walked a few miles back to my apartment with my shirt held on the top of my head to stop the bleeding. The doctors used the medical equivalent of a staple gun to sew me back up. That event taught me to always wear a helmet while riding.
• I met my wife, Katrina, at the same location that Katrina’s parents met several years earlier.
• I have not seen any movie of the Star Wars trilogy in it’s entirety.
• Cereal makes a good breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
• I can’t stand going to see doctors or dentists… I do have regular dentist cleanings, but I haven’t been to see a doctor in the past 4+ years.

Go Gauchos! The UCSB Mens Soccer team just took the NCAA title this past Sunday. But how can some enthusiastic UCSB students celebrate such a victory? I know, let’s throw one of the stadium goal posts into the ocean!

Of course someone was able to catch the event on video and post it to YouTube…

Ole!

I ran across a problem in the latest betas of Seasonality where the graphs would show up blank when printing. It took me awhile to fix this issue, so I thought I would post my solution here in the hopes that it might save someone else time in the future. Here’s a screenshot of print output before the fix:

The problem is that the Seasonality graphs are drawn using Core Graphics routines instead of the higher-level Quartz routines. I did this to squeeze a little more speed out of the drawing code, and also gained more customization with transparency settings and layered drawing. Basically, I grab a CGGraphicsRef using [[NSGraphicsContext currentContext] graphicsPort], and use it to draw all the other elements.

From what I could find online, it seemed that the problem was that while printing, the context isn’t referenced until later than it is when drawing it to screen, so the context doesn’t stick around long enough for the printing code to pick up on it and draw. So either I could find a way to retain the graphics context long enough for the printing to complete, or I could find a new way to draw my view for the printer. I didn’t want to retain a graphics context object because I think that makes the code a little messy, so I tried to find a new way to draw my view.

The first thing that came to mind was to not use all the Core Graphics routines to draw the graphs when printing. That would be a very large code change, and it’s a lot of extra code that isn’t used too frequently. The better solution I found was to draw everything to an NSImage first, and then draw the NSImage to the printer. Here’s some code…

- (void)drawRect:(NSRect)rect {
   NSImage *lockedImage;
   BOOL printing = ![NSGraphicsContext currentContextDrawingToScreen];
   if (printing) {
      lockedImage = [[NSImage alloc] initWithSize:rect.size];
      [lockedImage lockFocus];
   }

   // Get our graphics context.
   CGContextRef cgContext = [[NSGraphicsContext currentContext] graphicsPort];

   // Drawing code here...

   if (printing) {
      [lockedImage unlockFocus];
      [lockedImage drawInRect:rect
                     fromRect:NSMakeRect(0, 0, rect.size.width, rect.size.height)
                    operation:NSCompositeCopy
                     fraction:1.0];
      [lockedImage release];
   }
}

Here’s a screenshot of the output after the fix:

This solution has a small disadvantage, you don’t get the ability to print using the printer’s full resolution. Since Seasonality users don’t print too often, this tradeoff is okay, but it might be an issue to consider for other applications.

There has been a flood of excellent blog postings these past couple of days. Most are related to WWDC, but I threw in a few others as well. Here are the ones that caught my eye…

Brent’s WWDC talk: Brent has posted several entries on his blog, requesting tabbed interface updates (I second this), the open sourcing of Cocoa, UI requests for Leopard, and other random WWDC speculation.

Gus’ WWDC Predictions: Gus predicts resolution independence, VMware for Mac goodness, and other changes in Leopard.

Happy WWDC Guesses: Luis de la Rosa over at HappyApps has a few guesses up his sleeve as well.

Mike McCracken Cards: Mike McCracken won’t be able to make it to WWDC this year, but he’ll be there in spirit thanks to these hilarious cards he put together and posted on his blog today.

My imaginary friend hates your imaginary friend: Logtar talks about religion with respect to the latest political events unfolding in the Middle East. Very insightful.

The Price Is Wrong: Daniel Jalkut at Red Sweather Software talks about pricing shareware applications. Very good read.

Katrina and I took a much-needed vacation and spent the last week down on St. Croix in the Caribbean. I have to say, this is the best time of year to vacation down there. It’s off-season, so very few tourists were around and that made the trip much more enjoyable. St. Croix doesn’t get as many tourists as the other U.S. Virgin Islands (St. Thomas and St. John) to begin with. No crowds to compete with at the beach, traffic wasn’t an issue, and overall everything was much more relaxed.

We stayed at a resort that was right on the ocean, and our room happened to be on the first floor. We were able to walk off our back patio onto the sand, and it was gorgeous. Nothing beats reading on a hammock tied to two palm trees, snorkeling was just a short walk away, and the island is small enough that nothing is too far by car. Down there they drive on the left side of the road, which took some getting used to, but after a day or two it was second nature.

I’ll post some pictures to my Flickr account in the next few days. Of course a lot of things can happen in a week, and I’m still trying to catch up. Here’s some of the more notable online events…

Logtar interviews Dan Lacher: The weekend before we left, Logtar interviewed Dan Lacher at the local MiaMUG meeting. I was on the scene to take some pictures, which can be found on my Flickr page. The Podcast itself can be found on Logtar’s blog.

Happy Apps releases WebnoteHappy 1.0: Luis de la Rosa just released his first shareware application. Back in January, Luis released WebnoteHappy Lite, the free version of the app. I mentioned it here back then and all the same things apply for the full version. I gave Luis a quote about the software, and he ended up using it on the product page so that’s pretty cool. WebnoteHappy is a really great bookmark manager, so if you’re looking for something along those lines I would suggest checking it out.

Apple released the MacBook: Not going to say much about this because it’s been on all the news sites. It’s a pretty cool notebook though for a great price. Looks great in black too…

Yesterday was my birthday…and now I’m 28…that means I can no longer stretch 27 to mean in my “mid-twenties.” I’m now in my late 20s, no way around that. In all seriousness though, I really don’t mind getting older. I got some pretty nifty gifts (techies always get the great gifts), and Katrina threw me a surprise dinner with a few friends last night. It was pretty cool.

Anyway, I realize I haven’t posted here in awhile, so I thought I would give an update of everything going on here. Gaucho Software is going well, I’m finishing up the second beta of Seasonality 1.3 and hope to send that out soon. Unfortunately development got put on hold for a week while I sent my MacBook Pro in for repair.

So what happened to my MacBook Pro? Well, many early buyers were experiencing buzzing sounds coming from their laptops under certain conditions. Mine never really bugged me that much, since I’m used to computers making some noise, and you could only really hear it if you were in a very quiet room. Finally though, awhile back I woke up the display to find the left third of it not being backlit. It went away after about 10 minutes, so I thought it might be a fluke. I held off on it for a day or two to see if it was a lasting problem. Ended up being a definitive problem, so I called Apple and sent it in for repair. They got it back to me within 5 business days (including shipping), which was great, but unfortunately even after swapping the MBP’s motherboard the same problems were all there. The noise was the same, and the screen wasn’t backlit correctly. I called them back, all they could tell me was to send it back in…they couldn’t send me a loaner while mine was being fixed, and they wouldn’t replace it. Going another week without my MBP wasn’t an option because I really need to finish porting my apps to Intel, plus I felt that they already had a chance to fix it, so I shouldn’t have to send it back in again because they messed up (and who knows if the second fix would even work).

I ended up calling Apple’s customer relations number, and after talking with a few different people they offered to take it back for a full refund. Not only that, I have up to 30 days to send the defective unit back to them and they are paying for shipping. This way, I can go buy a new MacBook Pro and transfer all my data to the new machine before sending the old one back. Apple really came through in this situation, and I’m stoked to get a new MBP out of it. This time, I’m going to upgrade to the 2Ghz model. One benefit is that I’ll go from 1.5Gb to 2Gb of memory, which is an upgrade I was thinking of making anyway. Another is that after installing Windows with BootCamp, the 80Gb drive was getting a bit small. The 2Ghz model comes with 100Gb drive which should improve things there. The upgraded CPU and graphics chip memory are good bonuses as well.

So I’ll be heading down to the Apple Store today to pick up my new MBP. I’m pretty excited about it, and hopefully I won’t get another lemon this time.

Fact #382
If you live in Michigan and your household internet access is via a wireless link, watch out for ice storms. The ice will collect on your antenna and take your internet connection down.

Fact #383
If above-mentioned situation with ice on an antenna exists, a hairdryer is an effective tool for removing the ice.

A pretty wicked ice storm came through here yesterday and our internet connection went down yesterday afternoon. When we woke up this morning everything was covered with ice, it was quite an amazing sight. Clearing the antenna took about 20 minutes outside up on the ladder with an extension cord to plug the hairdryer into, but the ice is gone and our internet connection is back online.

In case you haven’t heard, the East Coast has been getting hit pretty hard by a blizzard today. New York City has reported 22 inches of the white stuff in some areas and the snow is still coming down. Jeff Masters has a report and some photos on his blog at the Weather Underground. Flickr also has some photos tagged with Blizzard2006. To everyone out there, stay safe while this gets cleaned up.

I feel just a little short-changed here… This storm came through Michigan Thursday night/Friday morning and barely dropped 2 inches of snow here. We should have at least gotten 5-7″ out of it…

Update: This blizzard just hit the record books for NYC…

“The blizzard of 2006 has dropped the most snow ever on New York City, a record 26.9 inches as of 4:10 pm at Central Park. The previous biggest snowstorm of all time was 26.4 [inches], set Dec 26-27 1947.” –Jeff Masters, link above.