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Cocoa NSAutoreleasePool
Autorelease pools are extremely convenient for not having to worry about memory allocation and freeing the allocated memory, similar to the Newton days with its garbage collection. A problem that I've been aware of with autorelease pools, but promptly forget all the time is that if you are in a tight loop and keep creating autoreleased items, you're going to run out of memory and crash. For instance, in the following block of code, without even realizing it, a new autoreleased NSDate is being created once every tenth of a second. If you are processing data for say 3 minutes, you have created 1800 of these that aren't being released.
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Bluetooth and the Intel iMac
After I setup the new iMac, I started testing it. One of the things I did was try to send a file from a Palm to the iMac via Bluetooth. Hmmm...didn't work. Start thinking about this and turn off the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse. Presto, the file transferred without problems. Turned keyboard and mouse back on and it stopped working. This doesn't bode well for our software; people already blame us for every problem on their machine, now I'm sure someone will say they can't sync with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse even though it is quite possibly not our problem. Lovely.
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Other People's Code - Open Source
I think that open source software (with license agreements that let me use it in commercial applications even if it means contributing my changes back) is great. We use it extensively in my work and have contributed back our changes as required in one component. Another component we use has proven to be a constant thorn in my side that I'm almost at the point that I'm going to scrap the code and write it myself; however, it does stuff that I don't know how to do. I've had to fix this particular bunch of code twice in the last week. On a positive note, it keeps me employed.
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New iMac
I picked up a new 17" iMac running the Intel Core Duo today to do testing and development. I didn't realize until I got home that I had the wireless keyboard/mouse model which wasn't a big deal as it was only $60 more (the box doesn't indicate this...not even the label, unless you can decode part numbers). Setting it up took a few minutes, but the wireless keyboard and mouse was kind of weird as it took awhile for the Mac to discover the keyboard and mouse after I figured out how to put in the batteries.