Seagate’s Momentus XT is awesome and we’ve got some.

This isn’t practical, it doesn’t get out the right message. The message we hear isn’t “save the whales” or “feed the starving” or anything useful. Those messages just become footnotes, and the real protesters have a lot to be upset about. This weekend, the medium was the message, and was ugly.

Oh man.

I’m not sure that the over-the-top security measures are really in step with reality. Maybe a month from now I’ll be eating those words, but right now it looks like they’re expecting a city-wide riot. What’s more terrifying: the idea of local law enforcement gearing up for a small war, or the possibility that it might all be necessary? Or maybe it’s self-perpetuating, I don’t know. The rhetoric from Star and Globe commenters is wearing thin too, though this is true for most stories (conspiracy theorists are particularly well-represented on G20 stories).

Above all the noise of dissenting opinions, I just hope the G20 passes uneventfully. Peaceful protests are one of those things that make Canada great; the right to yell through a megaphone without fear of arrest or martial law is something not all nations enjoy. I think it loses some of its relevance though once you see people being carried away on stretchers; does the us versus them mentality begin to upstage the actual issues? It’s not a rhetorical question, I really don’t know.

Back in June of 2009, the repair shop that had employed me for the better part of nine years folded. For some this was good news, for some this was expected, and for the formerly employed this was very sudden (we had in fact just hired a new technician when the news hit). Repair shops tend to have a very polarized client base: some love you, some hate you, and both are usually deserved at some point. Still, myself and the core group of technicians tried our best to make it the most kick-ass Mac repair shop in Toronto, and while there were certainly challenges to overcome (that’s putting it politely), I feel like we succeeded to a degree. Diagnosed by the next business day? Check. Earn Apple’s Top 5% plaque? Check. Make every single person happy?

Well, there’s the point about a very polarized client base, but the number of happy people well outstripped the the unhappy. I never wanted to work in the sort of service centres they portray on TV or in Dilbert comics, or god forbid the actual real life service centres they’re satirizing. You’ve probably seen these, where workers and customers are bitter enemies struggling for dominion and witty remarks. No, we wanted to be awesome. The service industry is unforgiving, so believe me when I say that life is much more pleasant when you’re sending people home happy rather than cursing your name.

So as you can imagine, not being employed put a bit of a kink in things — but we got better.

This week, myself and two colleagues became self-employed. We opened our Mac repair business in the University of Toronto’s Campus Computer Shop inside the downtown Koffler Centre, taking over the repair operations from the former staff. Our philosophy is the same as ever: be awesome, make people happy. As expected, there will be hiccups as we get going, but so far we’re pretty happy with the first few days. So, tell all your friends, and even a few strangers! Despite the shop’s name, our scope is not limited to U of T students and faculty, so anyone at all is welcome to drop off their grievances with us. Ideally you’ll get something nicer back.

This is SwipeHead, a sort of hybrid puzzle game for the iPhone and iPod touch. I’d explain how it works, but figuring that out is one of the more satisfying puzzles. It reminds me a bit of old LucasArts adventure games in which a challenge would be posed and various tools offered, but after that it was up to the player and their wits. SwipeHead, likewise, is meant to have an intuitive learning curve and once it gets going, is very enjoyable.

Though I might seem to be trumpeting my own horn, the real kudos go to the game designer, Leanne, over at Wizkeit Games, who designed and produced the whole thing. For my own part, it’s humbling to see my code executing on other devices and available on the iTunes Store. I know there iTunes Store is a pretty saturated market these days, but it doesn’t detract one bit from the glee. More horn trumpeting yet: it was accepted on the first submission, which Leanne and I were told doesn’t happen often.

If you’re looking for a unique experience among the many app clones on the iTunes Store, give SwipeHead a try. When I first saw the design documents, it wasn’t one bit like any other puzzle game I saw out there, and remains so even post-release. Though only a mere $0.99, there’s a free version as well to whet your appetite.

This is probably one of the most convenient methods I’ve ever come across. Feed it a name and it will return an image. Better yet, it handles caching for you automatically so that you don’t have to. Notice something about it though? There’s no alloc, meaning you shouldn’t call release. If you can’t call release, how do you get your memory back? This isn’t a big deal when using Mac OS X’s older brother, NSImage, since your average computer these days ships with several gigabytes of memory as opposed to the paltry 25MB or so that most iPhone apps are limited to. If you’re dealing with a lot of images on the iPhone though, this hands-off caching approach is going to cause problems.

The first obvious solution is to just avoid the convenience method and manually alloc and load each image with its full path:

UIImage *myImg = [[UIImage alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@/pony.png", [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath]]];

That’s not awful for loading an image or two, but if you’re going to load many images, why not encapsulate this in something more elegant? Since such a method would be useful application-wide, it furthermore makes sense for the method to exist in its own application-wide class, rather than just stuffing the method willy-nilly into whatever class you’re working in. Actually, if you’re going to go to the trouble of creating a new class just for a convenience method, why not make it do other neat things?

// ImageServer.h

#import

@interface ImageServer : NSObject {

     NSMutableArray *imgArray;
     NSMutableArray *nameArray;
}

- (UIImage *)imageNamed:(NSString *)name;

@end

And:

// ImageServer.m

- (id)init
{

     if(self = [super init])
     {
          imgArray = [[NSMutableArray alloc] initWithCapacity:0];
          nameArray = [[NSMutableArray alloc] initWithCapacity:0];
     }

     return self;
}

- (UIImage *)imageNamed:(NSString *)name
{
     for(int i = 0; i < [imgArray count]; i++)
     {
          if([[nameArray objectAtIndex:i] isEqualToString:name])
               return [imgArray objectAtIndex:i];
     }

     UIImage *newImg = [[UIImage alloc] initWithContentsOfFile:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"%@/%@", [[NSBundle mainBundle] bundlePath], name]];
     if(!newImg)
          return NULL;
     [imgArray addObject:newImg];
     [nameArray addObject:name];
     [newImg release];

     return [imgArray lastObject];
}

- (void)dealloc
{
     [imgArray removeAllObjects];
     [imgArray release];
     [nameArray removeAllObjects];
     [nameArray release];
     [super dealloc];
}

@end

So, what’s going on here? Well, you begin by allocating an ImageServer object, and then using it to grab images:

ImageServer *images = [[ImageServer alloc] init];
UIImage *myImage = [images imageNamed:@"pony.png"];

The second call should look familiar. Why not create a singleton though, would that not be less crude than allocating an object to… allocate more objects? Perhaps, but it’s worth examining what exactly the [ImageServer imageNamed:] method does. Each time the ImageServer instance loads a new image, it adds the name and image to the appropriate arrays; if the same image name is requested a second time, the ImageServer class can look it up and return the associated image, only allocating a new one if nothing is found. The reason this approach would fail as a singleton class is because doing so would defeat the whole purpose of writing this custom class, which is to have greater control over memory management.

In this non-exotic form, each UIViewController can allocate its own ImageServer, each of which maintains its own cache of images. When the UIViewController releases its ImageServer object, all of the cached data is flushed with it and your app regains that memory. If you want to flush the object but keep a certain image, it’s as easy as sending the image in question a retain message. ImageServers belonging to other UIViewControllers are unaffected however, meaning that the rest don’t have to reload their entire cache because everything was just thrown out.

As far as custom class solutions go, this is a very lightweight, simple solution. There are far more powerful, complex versions of essentially the same thing out there, but the important thing is it gets the job done, and it’s very extensible.

Addendum: Those with a bit more Cocoa know-how have probably realized that the code size can be cut down significantly by replacing the two NSMutableArrays with an NSMutableDictionary. The class is provided as-is in order to explicitly show what’s going on, but really, it could be more concise.

Here’s where it gets crazy. On my way to the register I pass another box, this one almost identical save for that it has 95 pieces and it’s not on sale. Instead of doing the rational thing and laughing my way past it, I stop and begin to wonder if this larger set is a better deal. Sure, it costs more, but it has more tools, and it’s favourable to grabbing the (marginally) smaller kit and topping it up with twenty more tools at $5 apiece. Wait! There’s a problem: I only need three screw drivers. What good are twenty extra tools that I don’t actually need? Maybe I’ll build a rocket ship one day and need a reverse-robertson 2.8x wireless hammer, but that’s still nineteen rocket hammers short of a good deal unless I actually end up using every piece.

Fortunately the madness passed and I left with the smaller set, but I had to wonder: what sort of person impulse-buys a 95-piece screw driver set?

“Can’t, or won’t?” I thought, in my best Kevin Conroy voice.

The problem, it turns out, is somehow related to the destination drive’s partition map, about which a few theories are being floated by others who have been affected. I hear you, PowerPC veterans, exclaiming “Of course! He must have an Apple Partition Table. How 2006.” Not so fast: the issue affects the requisite GUID Partition Table, and while there seems to be a few different causes, you’re more likely to run into this problem if you’ve chopped up your hard drive for a dual or multi-boot machine, or say installed Fedora and added a 2GB swap partition.

At least the solution is simple: pop open Disk Utility and resize your destination partition a couple times. Whatever the reason, most users are back in business after this digital flexing. My computer understands that I’ve made a profession out of fixing far worse nightmares, and would have none of this quick fix nonsense. Disk Utility managed to ratchet up the difficulty level by arbitrarily hating the ext3 file system upon which Fedora was installed, and crashed whenever asked to modify the partition map.

My computer forgets who its dealing with: someone who keeps a full back up and isn’t afraid to erase the partition map. Long story short, the software is installed.

Wordle may not be able to answer these questions, but perhaps it will provide a starting point. Wordle’s function is to absorb whatever text you throw at it, determine what words appear the most, and then create something that is at once pleasing to the eye, and full of useful information. Words that get repeated are made proportionally bigger, and since we’re visual creatures, the results may speak louder than a simple word count.

Of course, the news doesn’t stand still, so it trying to find answers from only a single day of stories would be inaccurate. Using five days worth of material would be better, and though it would probably be better still to take a whole year worth of samples (slightly difficult with the constant 24-hour news cycle), five days seemed like a sane way to start before committing to a schedule of daily copy-and-pastes. The following are tag clouds generated from five days worth of news site front pages, July 13th, 14th, 16th, 21st, and 23rd.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/

http://www.cnn.com/

http://www.foxnews.com/

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/

http://news.google.com/

http://www.thestar.com/

http://www.torontosun.com/

It may seem redundant to caption these, what with CNN’s tag cloud proclaiming itself so loudly, but look again at Google’s news aggregator and guessing becomes a bit more difficult: we’ve got words like washington suspiciously close to post, or new, york, and times swirling about, and links to a half-dozen other sources. It makes sense, since it’s an aggregator, but good lucking guessing whose without the caption.

There are plenty of things to be interested about. I tried to match each tag cloud’s colour scheme to that of its parent website, and it turns out that black and white and red all over is popular, with the occasional hint of blue. Here I was thinking that the Toronto Sun had nothing in common with the Globe and Mail, but there they are agreeing on something. Also of interest is that the BBC’s website displays more international sections on its front page than any of the other sites. Whereas many websites have a world section, the BBC’s website and tag cloud list Africa, Americas, Asia-Pacific, Europe, Middle East, and South Asia at the very front.

As for favoured stories? Obama, Sotomayor, and Jackson get plenty of attention on CNN and Fox’s front page (despite the latter being three weeks deceased at the time), yet these three barely register on the Canadian sites’ tag clouds. Is this because the stories weren’t covered as much by the Canadian sites, or was it because the Canadian sites varied their stories enough to suppress any from rising to the top? Or, do CNN and Fox vary their coverage just as often, but also put more stories on their front page? Another puzzle is the Globe and Mail’s tag cloud, which at first glance looks mostly like titles and headers with little story content. Is this another case of wide variety in content, or another case of little content to begin with?

Well, get analysing!