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Defective dog
Our dog had his root canal yesterday performed by Dr. Brook Niemiec. Everything went as planned, except after the initial exam, the vet showed us that Marley had an extra, useless tooth that was encroaching on his front teeth. So, that tooth had to be removed which made the $2000 dog bone even more expensive. Other than Marley being on some drugs for a week and having to eat soft food for 2 weeks, he seems to be doing fine and will be back to his normal self soon. As Marley has been a part of our lives for 3 years, I was very worried about the procedure as he had to be anesthetized. This may be a routine procedure, but anesthesia scares me. I've asked for copies of the X-rays and once I get them, I'll put them up. I figure that for what I paid to repair Marley's teeth, I might as well let others look at the pictures.
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Threading, a necessary evil
Anyone I know that really has a clue avoids multi-threading programming (except for some server applications) as there are so many gotchas. Making things thread safe sounds easy, but is extremely hard as it is quite easy to overlook an item or two I got bit by this in ReceiptWallet in 2 spots. In one case, I build thumbnails on a separate thread to keep the main thread (where the user interacts) running. The problem is that if the user does something, i.e. remove a page or change metadata, I clear the underlying document in the main thread. So the secondary thread tries to use the document that no longer exists and quickly crashes. The fix wasn't difficult; I simply had to know when the secondary thread was running and don't change things on the main thread until the secondary thread exited. Of course, I could never reproduce this (like many thread related bugs, it is nearly impossible to track down the cause), so figuring this out was a bit problematic.
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Cocoa bindings causing dealloc to not be called?
In tracking down a bug in ReceiptWallet, I discovered some end (at least to me) odd behavior. ReceiptWallet is an NSDocument based application. When the document is closed, is should call dealloc to release its memory. This wasn't happening. It appears that some things in my code prevented dealloc from being called; I had to unbind some Cocoa bindings (not all of them, however):
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Tracking down bugs
One of the toughest parts of my job is tracking down bugs that either I create, are operating system bugs, or are a combination. Most of the bug reports I get are extremely incomplete and don't help me. I also get crash reports sent to me so that I can try to see the problems. With the crash reports, some users put in a sentence saying what they were doing. Unfortunately, this doesn't usually help me find the problem and fix it.