// do something here

And the answer is, none more awesome…

I think this seals the deal now, I am going to have to be subscribing to satellite radio when the trial subscription runs out on my new car. Sirius/XM stockholders should be happy…

I always get a little nauseous when looking through someone else’s code and seeing things like this:

res = sqlite3_exec(database, [select UTF8String], NULL, NULL, &errorMsg);
if (res != outcome) {
    [testStringCapture appendFormat:@"%@,",obj]; //changed 2/2/2011
}
else {
    [testStringCapture appendFormat:@"%@,",obj]; //changed 2/2/2011
}

Alas, a little later on in the same method was some code that soothed my sensibilities as it is kind a perfect fit into the whole “do something here” theme:

res1 = sqlite3_exec(database, [select1 UTF8String], NULL, NULL, &errorMsg1);
if (res1 != outcome1) {
 
}
else {
 
}

As per usual, these code snippets are unedited (except for some formatting) portions of production code.

Did you ever have Objective-C code that would fail with an exception (such as asking for an objectAtIndex beyond the bounds of the array), but by the time you got word of it, all the stack trace had in it was the obj_msgsend and main? Yeah, I hate that.

Well I discovered that you can add a breakpoint to your project that will immediately break when the exception happens. To do this with Xcode 4, click on the Breakpoints symbol (2nd from the right) in the Navigator pane, click the + button at the bottom of the pane, and select Add Exception Breakpoint. From the bubble that appears, I selected Objective-C from the Exception choice (although I suspect you can safely leave it at all if you desire), and I left the Break selection at On Throw. Once you click Done, you should then have a new exceptions breakpoint in the list.

This was instrumental in helping me track down an issue on an app rescue that I am currently working on.

By the way, here is an awesome line of code that I found in the aforementioned app rescue. My brain hurts from looking at the code for long stretches of time, but there are some nice nuggets like this sprinkled in the code:

Assets *ass = [[Assets alloc]init];

I have to hand it to Apple, they really did a nice job with the Mac OS X Migration Assistant.

I decided that my battle tested MacBook Pro has had enough after 3 years of torture, and so I ambled down to the local Micro Center to pick up a shiny new 21.5″ iMac. Being the lazy developer type that I am, I decided to try and look into using the Migration Assistant so that I would not have to take out an external hard drive or USB memory stick to manually move lots of files from the old MacBook to the iMac.

The first attempt to use Migration Assistant did not go as smoothly as I had hoped. Since both machines were on the same wireless router, I first tried to use the wireless option for communications in the Migration Assistant. Bad move, the time for completion was fluctuating between 20 to 24 hours.

And of course, as I started to look at using Firewire, I discovered that the iMac has a Firewire 800 port, while the 2008 MacBook Pro has a Firewire 400 port. Back to the venerable Micro Center for a supporting cable.

Once I set up the Migration Assistant to run over Firewire, the estimated completion time never went over 50 minutes or so. I went downstairs to watch a bit of TV, and when I came back up a couple hours later, it was finished.

So I rebooted the iMac, and lo and behold, all of my stuffs from the MacBook Pro were on the iMac. Genius! (Bar???)

OK, now to the rant part of this post. That would be the “Rawhide in A” comment you see in this post’s title.

To my Yahoo e-mail address comes this message from some kind of guitar web site. In it, they have some news story on their web site that describes the top 20 movie scenes featuring guitar playing. I can’t pass that up, since I really like movies and I really, really like guitars.

In at number 3 on the list is the Bob’s Country Bunker scene from “The Blues Brothers”, and since I am pretty sure that it is a law in the United States that you have to watch any Good Ole Boys or Bob’s Country Bunker scene whenever the chance is presented to you, I click the YouTube link for the scene and start watching the 2 minute clip.

About 10 seconds into the clip, I do a bit of a double take. My wife and I both are big fans of the Leinenkugel Brewery in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, and so I am watching this clip, and I swear that I see the pretty unmistakable script Leinenkugel’s logo in the movie. Take a look at this screen capture 14 seconds in to the clip:

And I think that is very strange, since I never noticed it before, and I am the kind of person that notices things like that.

So I fire up the 25th Anniversary DVD of “The Blues Brothers”, and at about 1:21:02 into the extended version of the movie (side A), I see the following image:

Does anyone have any idea why my supposedly better widescreen edition of the movie does not have something that was in either a broadcast or pan-and-scan version of the movie??? It looks to me like for this scene, they just took the 4×3 image and chopped the top and bottom parts off to make it look widescreen, if this is the case that is disappointing. (I am not sure what to make of the IMDb technical specifications page for the movie, it lists both 1.33 and 1.85 ratios.)

BTW, happy belated 80th birthday to Leonard Nimoy. I used to be a huge Trek fan, but even I had no idea that William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy were born just 4 days apart of each other back on 1931. Fascinating…

The rechargeable battery for my Dell Axim X51V was looking a bit puffy, so I ordered a replacement battery pack off of Amazon.

Batteyr Pack

BTW, happy birthday to Niecy Nash. Tempestt is doing ok, but we miss the special energy and chemistry you had with your co-hosts.

Thanks to a little assist from my coworker John Boker, the amazing Asteroids javascript from Erkie is now fully integrated into this here very web site. Alls you have to do is type asteroids on any web page of this roided up web site (just make sure the focus is not set on a text field or the URL field), and blast away.

Here is the javascript that I added to the footer of my pages:

<!-- asteroids -->
 
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"></script>
 
    <script type="text/javascript">
        function asteroids()
        {
            var s = document.createElement('script');
            s.type = 'text/javascript';
            document.body.appendChild(s);
            s.src = 'http://erkie.github.com/asteroids.min.js';
        }
        var roids = "";
        $(document).keypress(function(e)
        {
            roids += String.fromCharCode(e.which);
            if ("asteroids".indexOf(roids) != 0)
            {
                roids = "";
            }
            else if (roids == "asteroids")
            {
                roids = "";
                asteroids();
            }
        });        
    </script>

Enjoy.

I wonder how the paint company has managed to keep the cost of a gallon of paint steady amidst all of these rising prices…

Oh wait, now I get it.

E-Tech update: They have once and for all denied my appeal for a refund on the Sony replacement keyboard. Maybe I should have done a more big budget picture to demonstrate instead of what was done. (99 cents total were spent on Blue Harvest, I needed some chalk to write on the clapperboard and there were no kids around to beat up so that I could steal some.)

It has been a while since I posted something, and so when I was cleaning up the files from an older computer last night and stumbled on this beauty that I screen captured way back on August 19, 2004, I figured I should share…

Don’t bother going to their web site and checking, Dell fixed it pretty quickly, just in case you were wondering. Oh, and no word yet from E-Tech eStore regarding my appeal.

Peanut allergies are really only a problem if you can open the package…  Oh wait, now I figured it out…

So I should probably take the jackhammer back to the tool rental place, I guess I won’t be needing it to eat my Kit Kat bar.

I think that Google might have the Gmail phishing filter set just a tad too strong. I was in my Gmail account this morning and accidentally clicked on the very first message I got in the account, which is of course the introductory e-mail that describes how to switch your existing e-mail over to Gmail. Here is what I saw: