// do something here

Here is something you may not have noticed (yet). If you use the ZipArchive code to create zip files in your iOS app, and you convert your app code to ARC, your zip files might not be created correctly. The problem exists here in the ZipArchive.mm file:

-(void) dealloc
{
	[self CloseZipFile2];
	[super dealloc];
}

If you use the CreateZipFile2 method to create your zip file, previously you would call the release method on your ZipArchive object, and the memory would be flushed away. Unbeknownst to you (but beknownst to the ZipArchive devs), your zip file was A-OK because of the CloseZipFile2 method call in the dealloc method.

But ARC conversion removes the release messages! Bugger!!! Just manually put in a call to CloseZipFile2 everywhere that you use the CreateZipFile2 method.

BTW, Happy Birthday to Kent Tekulve, former Pirates great and commissioner of the Pittsburgh Pirates Fantasy Camp. Unfortunately Teke could not make it to camp due to illness this year, we missed you Teke and hope you are feeling better.

Josh Abernathy of GitHub gave a presentation on the Reactive Cocoa framework last night at the CIDUG meeting. His way of describing the framework was a way to encapsulate and perform operations on a sequence of values over time. His UI demo using the framework was interesting, it was a bit hard to wrap the brain around in a quick demo setting, I would have to look at it again to try to understand and digest how it works and is beneficial over standard ways of doing UI operations.

BTW, today is the anniversary of the passing of Shawn Lane, who was an immensely talented guitar player. Any time you are feeling low, keep in mind that there are people who have gone through worse.

Last Friday and Saturday, I attended the CocoaConf conference held here in Columbus, Ohio. This conference, as you can tell from the name, is geared toward iOS and Mac OS X development. The conference was well run, thanks to Dave Klein and his family for that. The sessions I found the most interesting and informative were the sessions by UIAutomation and gesture recognizer presentations by Jonathan Penn.

For you Routzy fans out there, there was a review posted about the app, please check it out:

Routzy: The All-In-One CRM iPad App for Sales Professionals

BTW, Happy Birthday (posthumously of course) to Alfred Hitchcock, one of my all time favorite directors. And a sad note of passing, Les Paul entered the great jazz club in the sky this date 3 years ago.

Sorry about the delay between postings, but unfortunately I learned of the passing of my father while I was at the day 2 keynote address at Google I/O. So I think that days 2 and 3 the conference were good, but I was a bit distracted.

The best that I can say of my dad was that he sacrificed much, and asked for little in return. That is the mark of a great parent.

12/1/1941 – 6/28/2012

Good bye Padre. We will remember you forever.

It has been a while since I posted any misspelling and/or usage gaffs, so here goes something “special”.

This next one from a job posting  isn’t a true misspelling, as it would probably get past your average everyday spell checker. Check the 4th bullet point.

 And finally, I wouldn’t recommend clicking on the web story shown below if you happen to be working at a financial institution and you think that they might be red flagging certain employees for their web surfing.

Finally, Happy World Theatre Day to everyone.

I logged into my bank’s account to pay a bill this morning and discovered that some people have trouble with that extra 0.24 of a day that it takes the Earth to make one complete circuit around the sun…

Click on the image for the full story about March 1st and it’s twin brother.

BTW, a fond farewell to Davy Jones of the Monkees.

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.