Day: September 12, 2002

Brent: Hidden CoreFoundation XMLRPC classes

Brent points to the as-yet undocumented CoreFoundation XMLRPC header files and writes a sample app.

What does this mean? It’s now a lot simpler–in fact, it’s baked into the OS–for both Carbon and Cocoa programmers to make XML-RPC (and, one assumes, SOAP) calls. Before you could do this easily in AppleScript, leading to funny applications being released that were mostly Cocoa except for one AppleScript routine that was invoked by sending a Cocoa message to a hidden button…

Maybe I’ll play with this a little next week. First I have to live up to a promise I made to get OmniOutliner2OPML to actually produce parseable OPML files. Boy, for a hack written in one morning, that’s expecting a lot. 🙂
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The fabulous sound of wax

I finally got my record player hooked into my stereo. This is a bigger deal than it might seem: my record player and all my records were in a garage in New Jersey from April 2001 to June 2002, then in a moving truck going across country in early July, then in our garage until yesterday. Plus I had to add an adapter and another cable to reach from where I had to put the record player (too far for the attached cable to reach). But it sounds great. I played my vinyl copy of The Joshua Tree… which I got in 2000.

I hope Craig has seen this…

http://www.naturaltype.com/er-diagram.html

When I was a programmer we would have killed for something like this. There are a ton of business benefits too. It’s really hard to get all the stakeholders in a system design case to sit in the same room for three weeks to come up with the right structure for a data model. This collaborative ER tool provides people with a way to discuss ideas (albeit at a very limited level) from their own computers and collaborate in realtime on the design.

What this isn’t is a sufficient solution. In these sorts of scenarios, especially when building the first-pass data model for a system, you will spend the first week or more just arguing over the right entities and the implications that that has on the software that you’re building. So bundling this with voice collaboration, IM, and certainly a way to save and retrieve your work, might make this a pretty darn compelling product–or add-on to a development environment.

“The dinosaurs didn’t believe in you either”

Okay, the series of billboards signed “God” aren’t as bad as most of the explicitly religious signs you see on the back roads of America (digression: in my home town of Newport News, Virginia, there was a realtor, Paul Lotz, who had a big neon sign with his name on it; below it he had a sign that regularly said things like “I believe Rapture in early 80s.” Driving by it I used to ask my parents, “What does that mean?” When I was old enough to understand it, and it was the late ’80s, I would say snarky things like “I see Paul Lotz is now saying ‘Rapture will come soon.’ Guess he figured out God isn’t on his calendar.”). But things like “Let’s meet at my house Sunday before the game. -God” don’t go quite far enough for some people.

Check out saysGod.com for such insights as “I’m flattered you liked my book so much. Now why don’t you read something new?”, “Just look at this planet! Do you expect me to clean this up?”, “If you seek to know my ways, read a damn science book,” and my favorite, “I never said, “Thou shalt not think.” I hope to see these on billboards soon too.
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