I’ve been meaning to write a proper eulogy for Janis Joplin since we had to put her down (cancer @ 14 years) last fall. But I still can’t bring myself to do so. So, a short story…

While living in Connecticut with my sister Ann’s family, Janis got skunked one evening. Now, the best way to deskunk a dog is some combination of tomato juice and/or vinegar & water.

This led to my sister and my lovely wife Christine heading out to the drug store to pick up several boxes of douche to cleanse Janis’s skunky funk.

Upon returning to the house, Christine proceeded to cleanse Janis’s skunky fur with douche quite a few times, smelling Janis in between to determine how much more douching was required.

Not surprisingly, Christine’s skunk detection skills were stretched to their limits at the end of this and she needed a third party opinion.

So, marching downstairs, Christine asks of the first person she sees, “I’ve douched Janis 4 or 5 times now, can someone please smell her to see if the stench is gone?”

The first person, though, happened to be our cousin Andy. Andy had not, in fact, ever met Janis. Nor did Andy actually know that Janis was a dog.

Andy’s facial expression really can’t be described beyond the popular emoticon:

O_o

Apparently, George Carlin will rise from the dead on 7/23/08 at 7:30pm to entertain audiences one last time.

At least, according to TicketMaster (at this time).

(Somehow, Carlin would probably find this funny. Hell, he’d turn it into a 15 minute rant of brilliance and profanity that would leave me laughing my ass off while illuminating some vastly screwed up bit of our world. I’ll miss you terribly, Mr. Carlin.)

Update:

Evil Mad Scientists Laboratory has made the foundation of this build available as The Peggy for $80.

In typical EMSL fashion, that link includes tons and tons of information, including full details, board design, source, and loads of implementation notes.

So, apparently, it is being called Aqua Teen Day. Good enough.

Better yet, though, is that the fine folks of boston — the level headed public that makes the city such a great place — are celebrating the first annual “Aqua Teen Day” by decorating the city with LED art.

On January 31st, 2007, the authorities in Boston completely lost their minds. It wasn’t the first time, but this particular date was heavily reported and even the most head-in-the-sand die-hard “OMGWTFBINLADENFTChildren!!!one!!!” fear mongers found it ridiculous.

I am, of course, referring to the Aqua Teen Hunger Force “Hoax Device” bomb scare.

I could go on a political rant about fear based leadership and the general stupidity of the security theater played out in our cities and airports.

But that is boring.

I’d rather remind people of the jackassery that has happened and, once again, laugh at it. Then vote appropriately.

To that end, I purchased memorial kits from the fine folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and put them together over the last few days.

The results are just stunning. And effective. I brought the boards into work on Monday and, on the way home, stopped for a beer with boards in hand. Several folks asked about them and, upon explaining the history of the boards, they became just a touch more enlightened as to the stupidity of certain leadership and just a slight bit more inclined to learn more and vote accordingly.

Mission accomplished. With laughter included.

(The kits were a special edition from EMSL — you’ll have to contact them for availability. The LED “peg board” is generic; you can lay out the LEDs anyway you want to make any kind of similar display, including a “charlieplexed” mode that allows simple animations. I believe EMSL will be offering the generic form of the kit sometime soon.)

Update: CocoaHacks was quite a bit of fun. Not only did I demonstrate the rather silly little hack, but I ran it fully garbage collected. With one simple change (that should be in the next release), the MacFUSE framework works just fine with Garbage Collection enabled!

The best compliment came from Amit Singh; something along the lines of “That is absolutely the strangest filesystem I have seen.”

In any case, my little hack repository has been updated to be GC only. retain/release/autorelease/dealloc are dead to me (in this project, anyway).

If you want to build MacFUSE with GC enabled, simply set Objective-C Garbage Collection to “Supported” in Xcode in the MacFUSE framework project’s build settings.

At left, is a screenshot of the Finder browsing the Objective-C classes active in the runtime of a little Cocoa app that I wrote this evening.

The little app is called RuntimeFS and it contains a simple bit of code that traipses through the Objective-C runtime and collects information about the Objective-C classes encountered. This information is then barfed up by the elegantly simple delegate like API required by MacFuse to create a filesystem.

Let me restate that: MacFuse kicks ass. The Objective-C API is trivially easy to use. Trivially easy. I implemented this little hack in less than two hours, not having looked at the MacFuse API before. Nor did I read the docs; just looked at this example and one header file. I have implemented filesystems in a couple of different languages. Filesystems are hard. Or was. Not anymore.

I dropped the source code in the “Silly” directory of my public SVN repository.

Because, really, this is quite a silly hack. And hack it is — it doesn’t crash, but that is about all the quality assurance analysis I have done.

Free as in “MIT License” free. Have fun. I’m accepting patches, of course.

Future Stuff

If I were to go anywhere with this, the first thing I would do would be to move the subclasses into a subdirectory and then add other subdirectories to contain additional data.

Specifically, I would add directories like -1- Instance Variables, -2- Class Methods, -3- Instance Methods, -4- Subclasses, -5- Documentation (or something), etc…

The naming convention serves two purposes. First, it sorts nice like. Secondly, the names are invalid as class names and, thus, it makes handling the metadata vs. class directories trivially easy while also eliminating potential namespace conflicts.

Bad photo, right? Yup. But, at the moment, it is one of the very few iPhone photos taken entirely by nose control. Special, huh?

Of course, this rather amazing new level in human computer interaction required further investigation.

What can be used to wake an iPhone, unlock it, and take a picture?

• Toes work. Duh.
• Stomachs do not work. But it does tickle.
• A dog’s paw works just fine…
• … but licking the phone while trying to use it does not work.
• Nipples do not work. And the screen is surprisingly cold.

Ten years ago, Wired published an issue of their silly ‘zine that claimed Apple was pretty much dead and listed 100 ways to save the company.

It was hilarious then– full of leadership-by-armchair-comittee style suggestions– and even funnier now. Wired has long been a sort of Mad Magazine of technology and this particular article is one of the funnier demonstrations. There are a couple of good points on the list and — as a friend pointed out — good leadership is about choosing the handful of right ideas.

I lost all respect for Wired — canceled my subscription, even — when they did their “The Web Is Dead, Push Is Here” issue. It was clear that the writer(s) either had no clue at all or where pandering to investors. Given that Wired Ventures had dumped VC into various companies pushing Push technologies, I still suspect the latter.

Thanks to FSJ for posting the article link and cover picture. I still have a copy in my files somewhere. The one issue I kept. It is an effective reminder that doing the expected is often the wrong answer.

I grabbed my laptop out of my bag this AM and tried to connect the magsafe connector. It just wouldn’t stick. Huh.

I’m disappointed. My first month iPhone AT&T bill is only 14 pages; 9 pages of $0.00 data “calls”.

I guess that is the “price” I pay for having so many WiFi networks available to me. And I was thinking I’d found a good source for free packing materials…

Update: And that’ll be my only stupid huge bill. AT&T just spammed me a text message telling me that they were “… simplifying your paper bill, removing itemized detail.”

RantWhy do companies feel the need to use awkward sentence structure when text messaging? I could understand it if doing so drove the character count under the limit. But that does not apply in this case. One extra character would make it read… well.. like a sentence! “… simplifying your paper bill by removing itemized detail.”

So — been a bit quiet around here. Not terribly surprising. At Apple, we are all a bit busy prepping for a little event happening next week.

Anyway. Someone sent around this video. Very funny and very true. Does make me ask: where was this comedian performing such that the audience was effectively rolling on the floor laughing at such jokes?

For those wondering; Tommy’s on Saturday, Sunday and Wednesday nights, this year.

Now back to slides…

Update: Heh — boingboing pointed to a contest involving story writing. I entered mine, even though it was written exactly a week before the contest started. In the spirit of the contest, I even threatened to, like, sick a lawyer on ‘em or something.

No response. Wish me luck!

This little story popped into my head. For some reason, it came together as something a junior high school boy might doodle in reading class while bored out of his skull, likely listening to in depth analysis of something exceedingly boring like the John Galt speech in Atlas Shrugged.

Anyway… on to the story:

One day, there was a group of 9 sleek F9 fighter planes flying attack plan 11. As the plan dictated, 2 of said planes had executed phase 9D of the plan and were 74 miles into the run when an enemy plane from sector E3 fired several heat seeking missiles.

At that moment, what appeared to be sheep grazing in sector 5B were actually anti-missile batteries armed with D(evi)8 interceptor warheads placed to support the fight planes.

The mecha-sheep rose up and fired 41 such armed interceptor rockets which, due to their cosmically awesome explosive power, took out 56 of the inbound heat seeking missiles.

Impressive, huh?

While all this was happening, the enemy’s army of mecha-bovine ground skirmish units were warming up in sector C5. 63 of them, to be exact. Unfortunately, during warm-up only 56 proved to be mobile. Though an unfortunate number of downed bovine attack units, there were still 88 explosive patty rockets amongst the remaining forces. Clearly enough to render some awesome destructive power upon their foe.

Ultimately, the final battle was to be had on the rather crucial sector C0. Bloody, it will assuredly be.