Archive for November, 2007

As many have tweeted and ‘blogged, there was a bit of Cocoa gathering at Apple this week.

It was mighty cool to hang with so many of the folks that consume our products.

Personally, I was ecstatic to see that so many were embracing garbage collection and finding great success therein.

It is really gratifying to see people run with the tools that we [all of Dev Tech] have pushed out. Damn, you folks are creative!

Anyway, a twitservation (twitter-conversation) — more a half-assed argument– with Wil Shipley combined with the awesomeness of the kitchen led me to cook up 33 lbs of smoked pork for lunch today.

I did it just a bit different this time. Namely, I cooked it slightly longer — 23.5 hours, now that I have looked at the actual wall time — and slightly cooler.

I have moved to using a probe thermometer stuck through the gap between halves of the Big Green Egg to monitor temperature. As well, I’m using a large plate setter that coincidentally raises the cooking grid to 1/4″ below the opening of the BGE.

As a result, whatever temperature I set the Stoker too, it will absolutely be the cooking temperature at the interface between fire and food. As a result, this particular pork was cooked at a lower temperature than I have done in the past in that the gradient between cooking grid and top of dome ran as about a 30 degree downward slope (cooking grid @ 230, dome at 200). Previously, the grid probe was typically 1.5″ above grid and, thus, grid temp was probably a good 20 to 30 degrees higher than I intended.

The end result was that the fat and connective tissue was fully rendered, but the cuts of meat still had a slice to them! You could cut it with a fork easily enough, but it still required cutting.

Personally, I found it to be a more pleasing and versatile product than straight up pulled pork.

As an experiment, I halved some apples and placed the halves in a pan under the pork as it cooked with the open face up. No clue what was going to happen.

The end result was a bowl made of apple skin filled with apple stew where the water had been replaced by rendered pork fat.

Universally accepted as delicious. Next time, I’ll make quite a few more and bake them into a pie with little bits of pork fat strewn throughout.

A few weeks ago, the SWT folks came out to Apple to learn a bit about Cocoa & Leopard.

Very early in the week, they discovered the BridgeSupport generated XML metadata that describes almost all Objective-C and C APIs on the system (and is included with user installations of Leopard).

Using that, they whipped up a tool that automatically generates a set of Java classes that mirror the Objective-C classes, with all the necessary glue bits underneath.

End result? SWT apps are now Cocoa apps. The goal is to host Eclipse on top of this version of SWT and they already have some success on that front.

Very cool.

All of this work has been pushed back into the SWT repository and they have now put out a call for help from the community.

We went to the San Francisco Zoo for the first time yesterday. Quite the nice zoo; the animals all seem fairly content and the grounds were beautifully designed. The paths were all windy and it is quite easy to get pleasantly lost, only to find yourself in the midst of some random part of the world’s animals.

The zoo also hosts quite the population of wild birds. Lots of ducks and seagulls, of course. We also saw a couple of great blue herons wandering and flying about. Magestic birds!

As well, there were quite a few peacocks wandering the grounds. They were relatively tame. As I was walking behind one, I noticed that their tail feathers completely change color as the light shifts.

Roger helped me herd one into a patch of sunlight and I was able to capture the amazing color shift as the angle of light striking the tail feathers shifts by only a few degrees.

Pretty awesome creature. That really is the same bird. Didn’t catch any with their tail in full display mode.

I, of course, took a bunch of pictures.

A rather random Twitter conversation (WO ObjC is only real WO, No it isn’t, Ruby on Rails, Not Really, Pulled Pork, MMM… Food, Where to eat in SJ?) led to the question of “Anyone have suggestions on places to eat in Cupertino/SJ area?

Well, I do. Herein lies a list of random eateries that I — and many people I know — enjoy. It is centric to Cupertino and West San Jose simply because that is where I work [Apple] and live. Thus, you won’t find much from Mountain View (even though there are some awesome spots there).

In no particular order and of no particular focus (and very likely with obvious omissions). And, yeah, I have a thing about pizza. It has a thin crust. It should be crispy. It should not be a fracking cake. I love Chicago-style meat-and-sauce cakes, but they ain’t pizza. There are three kinds of pizza in North America; NYC style, Chicago style, and Shakespeare’s. Deal with it.

Sushi: Furu-Sato

Sit at the bar. Say hello to Young, Kevin or Brian for me. Consistently some of the best quality fish I have been served in a very friendly and well designed atmosphere. Straight forward sashimi, sushi, and rolls, though they also have an interesting menu, too. I live by Omakase here.

Mexican: Los Dos Compadres II

Total hole in the wall mexican spot that serves extremely tasty food cheap. Has real Coca-Cola — made with actual sugar and not corn syrup. Awesome seafood this and that. When they say “spicy”, believe it. I usually eat tacos because they are as close to the tacos I had in Arandas as I have found in CA.

Pizza: A Slice of New York

Having lived in New York city, I was utterly and completely dismayed by what passed for “pizza” on the West Coast. Thin crust that was thick and chewy? Fail. While there are a couple of good pizza shops around the bay area (see below), nothing compared to a really good slice of NYC style “walking pizza”.

Fortunately, an ex-NYC’er who had moved out to join Cisco felt the same, gave up his high tech job, and opened a classic NYC pizza joint.

The key is to get slices. Why? Because truly good, thin, crisp, crust, can only be had by cooking twice. It is just the way it is. In NYC, we would often order whole pies of reheated slices.

Beyond a kick-ass pizza, A Slice of New York also makes an incredible meatball parmesan and they import all the parts to put together a genuine Long Island cannoli.

Pizza: Pizza My Heart

A west coast pizzeria that actually does it right without just being a copy of an NYC joint. Quality pies with some delicious toppings. Good as slices and good delivered (ask for well done). Better yet, Chuck — the owner of Pizza My Heart and an iPhone — mentioned that a new location will be opening at De Anza & Stevens Creek with delivery to Apple! Never again will Dev Tech have a five hour brainstorming meating with mediocre to awful pizza!

Pizza: Amici’s

Best NYC rip-off pizza in the bay area. Thin, crispy crust, with tasty toppings. Nice salads and sides, too. Small, but excellent, draft beer selection.

Gourmet: Sent Sovi

Our favorite gourmet meal kind of place. I wrote up a chef’s tasting experience a while ago. It was simply awesome. Unlike some “cutting edge” dining establishments, Sent Sovi maintains an awesome balance between cutting edge and comfort food. A sort of culinary adventure with your world-class-chef mom, if you will… Has many special events throughout the year.

Gourmet: Manresa

Cutting edge high cuisine that challenges your palette. Christine and I had a phenomenal dinner at Manresa, but it was far from comforting. It was truly a culinary adventure and one that I’ll always remember fondly. Delicious and amazing creations often involving as much hardcore science as kitchen wizardry.

Chinese: Tsing Tao Restaurant

Awesome tasty chinese food. Family style restaurant in that showing up during a weekend will usually mean a 45 minute wait as the place is packed with Chinese families enjoying a meal together. I have yet to be disappointed by a dish.

Location is everything: BJ’s Restaurant

I likely never would have visited BJ’s a second time if it weren’t for the fact that it is in the parking lot of Apple’s main campus. As a result, I eat lunch at BJ’s once a week and often have a beer or appetizer after work. They have some good beer (nutty, blonde, red, seasonals) and some bad (stout, porter, and occasionally bad kegs of anything else). Food is Pub Food. But there are some gems on the menu; sliders, appetizer pizzas (not the deep dish atrocities), and some of the sandwiches. You have to sort of zen with the service staff to enjoy the place; all things in good time.

Cafeteria: Caffé Macs

The main Apple employee lunch cafeteria. Wood-fired Pizza. Sushi. Burrito bar. Sandwich bar. Grill. Salad bar. And more. Lots and lots more. All made with top quality ingredients and all, quite frankly, pretty damned delicious! Score yourself an invite from an Apple employee, if you can, as it is worth it.

Mexican: Tommy’s Mexican Restaurant

Yeah, like such a list as this would not include Tommy’s. Excellent yucatan style mexican food and the world’s best tequila bar (no, really). I generally stick with the specials, if available; molé, whole fried snapper, anything pork, anything beef. Awesome tamales. And, of course, great margaritas. Say hello to Julio for me.

Sammich: Amato’s Cheeseteaks & Hoagies

Awesomely delicious cheesesteak and chicken sandwiches. HUGE. Plan on 2 people being full after splitting a small. Good fries, too. This place pretty much does nothing but hoagie style sandwiches and they have been doing ‘em for a long time. Nice folks, too. Be kind, they’ll serve you well. Be an ass, they’ll throw you out. As it should be.

I’ll add more as I remember ‘em. Sadly, I’m at a complete loss to recommend a good dim sum spot in the area. Any recommendations?

In short, Yes. But not without some pain.

You can grab an example of the Python and Ruby bridges working together in a Cocoa application from either this downloadable zip or from this Subversion repository (in case something actually changes).

It works. Sort of. Ironically, this likely would have worked better under the pre-BridgeSupport versions of RubyCocoa and PyObjC.

Specifically, RubyCocoa and PyObjC both assume that nothing else might have loaded the dynamic libraries that are automatically generated by the gen_bridge_metadata script. So, either bridge will quite happily attempt to load /System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Resources/BridgeSupport/Foundation.dylib and then barf mightily when the other bridge has already loaded the same dylib.

The example is rife with silliness related to catching the resulting exceptions and ignoring them. Worse, the fallout is such that from Foundation import * doesn’t actually cause the Objective-C classes to be defined within the importing module.

There is a back door — objc.lookUpClass() — but this is yet further evidence that, at this time, mixing these two languages in a single Cocoa application is not anything more than a silly hacque (as the SVN repository subdir indicates).

What does it do?

Not much, really.

• Start with RubyCocoa Application Template (because I can deal with brokeness in Python, I wanted to start with something working in Ruby)
• NSApp Delegate written in Obj-C
• Finish loading hooks used to bootstrap PyObjC/Python (with gross exception ignoring goofiness related to the dylib)
• Bind a table view to an array of dicts where each dict has the key “name” leading to a string value bound through array controller.
• Array controller bound through app delegate method.
• App delegate returns array of dictionaries by calling python based NSObject subclass.
• Python based NSObject subclass composes an array of dictionaries (all python) from a combinatio of Python strings and Ruby strings by calling an instance of a Ruby based subclass of NSObject.

Very little code. Lots of moving parts. Some gears grinding. Maybe even a gear tooth or four missing. Enjoy.

We had an awesome thanksgiving meal over at a friend’s house. Somehow, we ended up with 7 pies for 10 people.

I made two butternut squash pies. Ben brought two walnut pumpkin pies and two closed top apple pies. Finally, Chris P. brought a sweet potato pie.

All delicious!

And that level of excess was the theme for the rest of the meal. We had green beans with fennel, salad, sweet potatoes with marshmallows on top, cranberries, and probably a couple of other dishes that I can’t remember.

And, of course, there was Turkey. Delicious oven roasted perfectly cooked juicy turkey. With stuffing.

I also brined and rosemary smoked a 20 pound pork leg. Cooked it to an internal of 145 degrees in about 4.5 hours on the BGE> The end result was just flat out stunning.

OK — I finally got around to actually following the instructions on this red sweater post. Ahh… much better.

Now MarsEdit actually shows me content pretty close to how it’ll look when published. This should greatly reduce the # of round trips when integrating pictures and text.

Got it mostly working in about 10 minutes. Still not quite full fidelity; flickr and google content doesn’t show up, but that is more of a feature than a bug.

Tedious, but worth it.

My first Nintendo Wii was a lemon; it suffered from the video corruption issues related to GPU overheating and/or failure. Nintendo was extremely efficient at addressing the problem, not only replacing my Wii but also migrating all data — downloaded virtual console games and Miis — to the new Wii.

Or so I thought.

It appears that the Miis were migrated and not restored to the new system. That is, the system believes that the Miis were copied from some other system (which, technically, they were).

Why is this a problem?

Because I cannot edit Miis that I created on the original system nor can I use my Miis for new features like the Check Mii Out channel.

At this point, it appears that my only recourse is to recreate my Miis. All of them. Including losing all saved data, scores, accomplishments, etc…

Sigh.

I have a technical support ticket open with Nintendo. Hopefully, since it was their screwup, they’ll have a fix. Though, honestly, I can’t imagine sending my Wii to Nintendo just to preserve my Pro Golf rating and my 1.45kg of brain.

If you have had your Wii serviced by Nintendo and said service involved replacing the Wii, you might want to see if your Miis are really your Miis, too!

While in Missouri, My mom taught me a neat trick for stuffing garlic (or other chunky spices) deep into a piece of meat. We made a roast leg of lamb on Dad’s new Big Green Egg and it was delicious.

Upon my return home, I decided to recreate the magic, so to speak.

Pictured at left is the result. Rare, garlic infused, leg of lamb. Smoked over big chunks of rosemary wood, which is evident by the beautiful red smoky color of the end piece on the far left.

I paired it with a bit of mint jelly (of course!) and some baked aspargus that had been tossed with salt, pepper, and sesame oil.

Delicious. Click on through for pics/instructions on jamming the garlic yumminess into the meat.

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A while ago, Flying Meat released Acorn, an image editor built with a focus upon simplicity.

I have never much been into image editing. I’m simply not smart enough to use PhotoShop and don’t have the interest to invest the time necessary to overcome my mental limitations in the face of that application.

The last real image editing I did invovled 2-bit black and white icon editing on NeXTSTEP.

I do, however, have a certain passion for whole image editing. That is, I like taking photos and I like tweaking ‘em a bit here and there to emphasize whatever it is that I want to capture.

So, with that said, I’m not even going to try to review Acorn beyond saying that it really is simple enough that a genre-incompetent user like me was able to launch the app and get done exactly what I wanted with very little spastic monkey style interaction with the user interface.

I.e. Acorn works. Acorn is simple. And Acorn did what I wanted with minimal fuss and, in this case, fluid integration with Aperture as its external editor.

GraphicConverter — an application that I purchased long ago, without regret — has been deleted. Whereas GraphicConverter is a more powerful application, the user experience pales in comparison to Acorn.

I would gladly pony up the $40 for a license to Acorn. But I didn’t have to.

As a way of saying thanks for my involvement in PyObjC over the years, the fine folks at Flying Meat sent me a complimentary license. Thank you. Seriously. Very much appreciated.

You see, Acorn has a plugin model and you can write plugins in either Objective-C or Python. Python modules are written via PyObjC. Brilliant. Elegant. Love it.

Is speed a problem? Not really. Most of the work in the plugins will be done by CoreImage filters or the like; Python is the configurating glue on top.

Very, very cool.