// do something here

I’m storing birthdays in Core Data, and now I want to get a list of entities sorted by the day of their birth. However, I just cannot sort by the date, since the year of their birth would take precedence, I just need to sort by the month and day of the NSDate stored as the birth date.

The big problem that I faced was trying to find out how to get the Julian date from an NSDate. Well as it turns out, Julian date does not correctly describe what I was looking for, I needed to look for ordinal date.

After a bit of investigation, I was able to put together this category that I have hung off of NSDate in my app:

- (int)ordinalDate
{
    return [[NSCalendar currentCalendar] ordinalityOfUnit:NSDayCalendarUnit 
             inUnit:NSYearCalendarUnit forDate:self];
}

This, along with a sortUsingComparator of my NSMutableArray of contacts, is exactly what the doctor ordered.

BTW, Happy Birthday to the Grand Canyon National Monument, created this day in 1908, which eventually became the Grand Canyon National Park. (Yet another must see place.)

Yup, yet another “year in review”.

There was the good. I finally got my Batter vs. Pitcher app into the App Store, and found my way to a new job that was way better than the one I had previously.

There was the bad. The passing of Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, and unfortunately my beloved male schipperke Kirk hit home for me, and the Pirates turned a June first place NL Central tie into yet another sub-.500 season.

There was the ugly. My November presentation to the Columbus iPhone Developer User Group comes right to mind, and then of course there was that whole thing with being able to play MP3 files on my brand new Samsung Charge Android phone.

Here’s hoping that all of you out there have a safe and happy new year, and that 2012 is better than your 2011.

Love him or hate him, our industry lost a real visionary today.

Over the next days and weeks, depending on who you listen to, there will be many words used to describe Steve Jobs. Which words are true? The simple answer is that all of them will be true, and none of them will be true.

The reason for this apparent contradiction is because that he was an individual that defied convention. Sure, not all of his ideas and products were slam dunks, but who among is so perfect as to measure up to our own ideals?

Simply put, a lot of Apple’s products are flat out awesome. Oh, and by the way, did I forget to mention that Steve ideas and products brought about massive changes in the computer industry, the consumer electronics industry, the motion picture industry, and the music industry?

Yes, kind words even though Steve killed the Newton platform and caused my software development company in Florida all sorts of problems back in 1998. I just wish I had bought the stock back then when it was right around the $20 level.

Steve, you will be missed.

The last thing the internet needs is yet another commentary about September 11, so I will be brief.

I used to listen to sports radio. A lot. Especially when I lived in Safety Harbor, Florida.

It seemed like just another Tuesday morning drive to the office down in St. Petersburg. Tony Bruno was on the air yakking about something or the other, who can remember what. I pull into the First Union parking lot at around 10 minutes until 9 or so, and Tony is making some kind of comment about a fire in a skyscraper in New York.

Cross the street, quick elevator ride up to the 6th floor, and there is dead silence amongst my team. When it was clear what was happening, my first thought was that my wife worked on the 29th floor of a building in downtown Tampa, which thankfully was evacuated very quickly.

The comic relief that morning was provided by Jim, our company president who was scheduled to fly out of town on business that morning. He called me at the office from his cell phone as he was waiting in traffic trying to get to the Tampa airport, asking me what was going on. (I am not sure what Jim listens to while driving, apparently nothing.) I told him to turn around and head back home.

Much like everyone else on that day, we followed along with the news at the office until the internet was overwhelmed with traffic, at which point we switched over to radio. I tried to keep everyone focused to try and get something done, but it was a lost cause and we closed the office a few hours early.

The air travel experience was much different when I traveled to my brother’s wedding 10 days later. My wife also had a plane ticket but would not go with me, and I could not blame her. Are we better or worse off in this country after the events that occurred on that day? I am not sure how to answer that, so I will leave it up to posterity.

But I will tell you to make sure to hug family and friends today to remind them how much they are appreciated.

We must not fear.

We must not forget.

Well, I gave in and uninstalled the official Twitter app from the Droid Charge, and what do you know, my MP3s play. I can now enjoy my ringtone of “The Analog Kid”.

Today was the eagerly awaited Stir Trek event. I met some former co-workers at the Starbucks before the conference began, and then made my way over to the Marcus Crosswoods for the start of the conference.

The sessions were heavily .NET related, as you would expect from a conference put on by .NET folks. The sessions I attended were What’s new in ASP.NET MVC 3, NuGet, and MvcScaffolding by Jon Galloway, Github: Social Coding meets Enterprise Version Control by Joe O’Brien, A Crash Course in Windows Phone 7 Programming by Jesse Liberty, Multiplatform Physics games with Corona by Josh Smith, and Mobile Smackdown featuring Twitter apps courtesy of Jeff Fansler, Chris Judd, Justin Munger.

Following the sessions was a screening of the movie Thor. As one of my former co-workers tweeted after the movie, “What thor lacks in quality it makes up in volume”.

And by the way, thanks to all of you who downloaded my Stir Trek iPhone app. It was a quick and fun project to do.

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…

Tonight I attended the Central Ohio .NET Developers Group meeting at the Microsoft office in Polaris. Jeff Blankenburg gave a presentation on developing applications for the Windows Phone 7 platform, and Mel Grubb gave a short talk on the Should open-source testing library.

Jeff’s presentation was very high level, but still informative. He did confirm my biggest disappointment on the platform, and that is the glaring lack of a data store. I guess that Microsoft couldn’t find anyone to port over the SQL Mobile 2005 code. Or maybe even the SQL Server Compact code. Or the SQL Server Mobile Edition code.