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Debug Logging in Shipping Code is not nice
During some development today, I had to install the scanner drivers for my HP 6110xi all-in-one device. Knowing that scanner drivers have been consistently horrible for the Mac, I decided against installing on my main machine (which also serves as my development machine) and instead installed it on one of my test machines. Well, it is really sad to be right in this case. The 101 MB download for the HP scanner included a whole lot of crappy software. As I was debugging my application, I write a bunch of stuff to the Console and as I was watching the Console, I saw lots of stuff like this:
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Learning new technologies (Apple technologies, that is)
For a long time now, I've been wanting to learn various Apple technologies such as Core Data and Bindings. However, it hadn't been until last week when I finally had a chance to start learning them as well as Image Capture Framework. I came up with an idea that I'm excited about and started work on the project last week. Since I'm supporting OS X 10.4 and later, I can use Cored Data and Bindings (bindings go back to 10.3.9 or so). I always have trouble learning new software stuff if I don't have a use for it; now that I have a use for it, I learned both technologies in a matter of days. I'm pretty impressed with Core Data. It works well and I haven't found anything to really dislike about it, yet. Bindings, on the other hand, sounds great in theory, but sometimes just doesn't work how I want it to work. So, I spend a lot of time trying to jam a square peg in a round hole until I give up and go back to the way I did it before. This isn't to say that bindings are useless, they're just not for everything.
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First Impressions of the Sony Reader
I managed to get my hands on a Sony Reader yesterday as I've been itching to get one for awhile now. The digital ink technology is very intriguing and I wanted to see and use it for myself. First off, the price tag of $350 is a bit steep to make it a generally accepted consumer gadget, but I'm a technology person so I added it to my collection.
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512MB of RAM is ridiculous
Years ago (when Bill Gates said that 640 K is all that is needed or something like that), 512 MB of RAM would have seemed like overkill. Unfortunately (I guess depending on how you look at it), this is no longer the case. I had to send my MacBook Pro in for repairs as it had an annoying whine when running on battery which forced me to use on of my Mac Minis with only 512 MB of RAM for a few days. It clearly wasn't the speed causing things to slow down (1.66 MHz Core Duo on the Mini and 2.16 GHz Core Duo on the MacBook Pro). The OS kept having to swap things in and out of RAM, everything I did took ages. I was tempted to go buy 2GB of RAM, but couldn't justify the cost for a test machine. I can't believe that Apple (and other computer manufacturers) ship machines with this little RAM knowing that it won't be enough. That's how they keep the cost down; pay $600 for the machine, spend another $300 in RAM.