/dev/random

I now have most of my code working on the Intel Mac. Once again, I need to reiterate this bit of advice: Never assume Macs are Big Endian.
We already have a cross platform product that works on both Macs & PCs. Since it deals with binary data read from a file, it needs to [...]

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Flooding

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

We’ve been spending the last few days watching the news & waiting for Wilma. We already have a lot of flooding from the heavy rains we had Friday night.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Waiting for Wilma”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2005/10/23/waiting-for-wilma/” });

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My Motorola V551 phone is an example of very poor user interface design.
The initial function of the left soft button is display recent entries.

When you select it, the left button becomes ‘exit’ and the right button becomes ’select’.

I very often find myself hitting the left button again, which is the most natural action, rather than [...]

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Nothing to see here, I’m just trying out Flock’s blog editor.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Flock Browser”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2005/10/20/flock-browser/” });

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I found that Drupal CVS was way too unstable, so I upgraded the condo site to 4.6 instead. I was still able to use the image gallery module and the nicer theme.

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Condo site upgraded”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2005/10/20/condo-site-upgraded/” });

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Hurricane Wilma may hit us this weekend. This has been a hell of a season, and it’ll probably be like this from now on. So far we’ve been lucky and avoided any damage, but our luck can’t hold out forever.
I don’t think I can take another season like this one. Enough already!

SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Not [...]

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I’m trying out Drupal CVS (which will eventually become 4.7) at the condo website and I’m running into lots of problems. The editing forms are badly broken. With Flexinodes such as the new Event, custom fields aren’t shown in the entry form so you can’t really do anything. The image gallery module, which is one [...]

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There must have been a lightning strike right outside my window. I saw it and heard the thunder at the exact same moment. That was scary! The cats are still hiding. My DirecTV has been out for almost an hour.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Big storm”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2005/10/18/big-storm/” });

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I’ve created a new category, Mac x86 for all of my posts about porting to Intel. You can also subscribe to a feed for that category only here
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “New category & feed”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2005/10/18/new-category-feed/” });

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For any networking code, make sure you’re using htonl & htons when building a socket address structure. If you look at the structure you’re passing to connect(), the IP address & port should appear reversed. Dealing with these byte ordering issues can be very confusing. Always be aware of what byte order is expected for [...]

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A very interesting item at MetaFilter (original article at NY Times) compares today’s Republican party with the Whig party of the early 19th century.
Is the modern GOP a repackaging of the old Whig party? The blend of businessmen’s aversion to government regulation, down-home cultural populism and Christian moralism that sustains today’s Republican Party is [...]

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I registered a domain for my condo (mirroring the current more unwieldy name) at Yahoo Domains a few days ago because their $2.97 offer was tempting.
I figured I could change the DNS records to host it at DreamHost, as I did with my other domains registered at GoDaddy or DirectNIC. I found that Yahoo’s [...]

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I got a major part of my application working on the Intel Mac.
Here are a few macros I came up with to handle the byte ordering issues when reading & writing binary data from a file:

#define W(w) ((unsigned short)w)
#define WSWAP(w) (W((W(w) << 8 ) | (W(w) [...]

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I’ve been trying out the new recommendation feature in iTunes 6 and it’s giving me some very weird recommendations. It tells which album you own prompted it to recommend a new album and those recommendations don’t make any sense. It recommended Kanye West (who I really hate) because I bought “Takk..” by Sigur Ros. It [...]

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Benn Loxo du taccu points out today is also the anniversary of Franco’s death in 1989.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Franco Remembered”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2005/10/12/franco-remembered/” });

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The XCode debugger (and gdb) will confuse you with word & long values. For example, I have an IP address & port stored as the bytes 00 50 c0 a8 0 64 (that’s 192.168.0.100:80). Displaying memory in the debugger will show it as a8c05000 00006400 if you use the default word size of 4. [...]

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On October 12 1998 Matthew Shepard died after being beaten and crucified on a fence in Laramie Wyoming.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Seven years ago today”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2005/10/12/seven-years-ago-today/” });

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Rovenge (rO-’venj), n: Politically motivated retribution. The White House sought rovenge against Joseph Wilson.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “A new word”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2005/10/12/a-new-word/” });

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Never assume Macs are big-endian. I found code which uses #ifdef __MAC__ to decide whether byte order swapping is required - that’s just plain wrong.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Porting to Intel II”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2005/10/11/porting-to-intel-ii/” });

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Visit cronyjobs.com to secure a lucrative career both decrying and luxuriating in the spoils of Big Government! No experience necessary!
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “You too can have a lucrative government job”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2005/10/10/you-too-can-have-a-lucrative-government-job/” });

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