• Illegal Immigration vs. Speeding

    My views on illegal immigration keep shifting, but after a discussion I had yesterday, I think I have nailed down my position (at least for now). It is quite apparent that the US economy wouldn't survive without undocumented (illegal) workers. How many of the former auto works would go out in the fields and do backbreaking work to pick crops? How many would do the low paying jobs just to survive? There are so many industries that undocumented workers take jobs that no one else wants. We should be grateful that they're there to fill in the gaps.

  • Flip-flopping is the sign of intelligence

    Some candidates in the current presidential race (and prior races) have been accused of flip-flopping their positions on various topics. The media and other candidates make this out to be a bad thing.

  • Crappy coding bites me again

    I write a lot of code for ReceiptWallet as well as my day job doing contract work, so it goes without saying that I write some good code and some bad code. I like to think that I mostly write good code with a low bug count. I've been getting some really odd crash reports with ReceiptWallet and no one has actually sent a description of how they managed to crash it. I took a look today based on some guesses I had about how a customer was using the product and managed to track down the crash to one line of code; granted the crashes didn't point to the line of code and were all across the board, but when I commented out the line, the funky behavior stopped. Turns out it was a really stupid bug; I use Cocoa Bindings in ReceiptWallet which saves code and is, in general, pretty neat. Basically in the UI, I specify that a particular field is bound to a variable. Then in the code, I set the variable. The trick is that the variable has to be set using Key Value Coding (KVC) such as:

  • Wire cleanup

    Like any computer geek, I have a ton of stuff on my desk which leads to a ton of wires. Periodically, I attempt to figure out what to do with them. When I got my new desk, I put some wire runs under my desk to help with the clutter. That lasted a little bit, but I kept adding more stuff and it became a mess again. This week, I added another wire run, got some velcro ties and switched out a surge suppressor to one with 12 outlets! (I call it my vampire surge suppressor as I turn it off at night so that all the stuff that sucks power when not on won't suck power.) I seem to have a lot of power bricks on cords, but not many of the large transformers that seem to block outlets. This is handy as I come shove them up in the wire racks.