Category: Nerd Fun
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Mac Pro
Search for “Mac Pro” and you’ll get this article, You probably won’t be buying a Mac Pro this year, this video, Do I Regret buying the Mac Pro? 3 Weeks later.., and this Quora question, Is the New Mac Pro worth the price? The conventional wisdom is that Mac Pro is expensive, for professionals only,…
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RAM Disk
Slow Processing I’m writing a book. A “user guide” for a side project. This book is ballooning to 50+ pages. You would think that today’s modern work processors could handle 50+ pages with the CPU cores, RAM, and SSD drive space at modern desktop computer’s beck and call. That is what I thought. I was…
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Unit Tests Equal Awesome
I’m working on a hobby project iOS app that lets me track my comic book collection. I’m interested in comic books because all these super heroes from my misspent youth rule the world of popular culture. While the cool kids were playing sports and going to parties I stayed at home reading comic books. In…
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Is It 1998 Again?
Set the Dial to 1998 Let’s power up the time machine and take a quick trip back to the wide world of tech around 1998. Microsoft was the Khaleesi of software and controlled a vast empire through Windows, Office, and Internet Explorer. Microsoft marched its conquering army of apps over the desktop and through the…
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Emoji Tac Toe Opened Sourced
Happy Father’s Day! To celebrate my 28th Father’s Day I’ve opened sourced Emoji Tac Toe. It’s actually not a big deal to anyone but me. It’s kinda of scary open sourcing code that you wrote alone and without first cleaning it up. But what the heck. If someone can learn something from this code,…
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JavaScript, Swift, and Kotlin Oh My!
This blog post now lives on http://blog.viacom.tech/2017/05/31/the-co-evolution-of-javascript-swift-and-kotlin/ (and it’s much shorter and better!)
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Eternity versus Infinity
I just completed reading, at long last, Isaac Asimov’s The End of Eternity. Like many of his novels, EoE is a morality play, an explanation, a whodunit, and a bit of a prank. The hero Andrew Harlan, is a repressed buffoon at the mercy of various sinister forces. Eventually Harlan finds his way to a…
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Notes on NSUserPreferences
You can set and get NSUserPreferences from any view controller and the app delegate to they are a great way to pass data around the various parts of your iOS App. Note: NSUserPreferences don’t cross the iOS/watchOS boundry. iOS and watchOS apps each have their own set of NSUserPreferences. In the example below you have…
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Faceless Phone
About twelve years ago I attended a management leadership training offsite and received a heavy glass souvenir. When I got home after the event I put that thingamabob, which officially is called a “tombstone”, up on a shelf above my desk. Little did I know that after more than a decade of inert inactivity that…
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On the Naming of Functions
A thoughtful coder once said that “it’s more important to have well organized code than any code at all.” Actually several leading coders have said this. So I’ll append my name to the end of that long linked list. I’m trying to develop my own system for naming functions such that it’s relatively obvious what…