I purchased a current model MacMini (Mid 2011) to serve as a Continuous Integration server. I chose the one model that has 4 GB and 2 HDDs because the larger RAM certainly should benefit the overall performance and 2 HDDs would give me an opportunity to experiment with striping the hard disks to see what performance could be gotten from that.
Author Archives 
TWIT haunted by Cocoanetics
One day before the WWDC 2012 keynote a group of Austrians hired a car and drove north to Petaluma where the TWIT podcast studio is located. We have been long time fans of Leo Laporte and his prize-winning podcast pioneering. So we were delighted to be witnessing the taping of This Week in Tech #357.
One year before, when I attended my first WWDC I was less well organized and at this time Leo Laporte was still residing in what they called the “TWIT Cottage” a small house with next to no room for guests. But this year 2012 was different since just a few months earlier TWIT had raised enough money to move to their much larger current studio.
Because of this emailing ahead and reserving seats was but a formality.
Leap Second Attack
Comics mentioned that last night we would get more rest, exactly one second. Hardly worth noticing though, if it weren’t for several computer systems which seemed to have issues with suddenly finding them one second out of whack.
The reason being that (in UTC) yesterday was one second longer than usual because of an inserted Leap Second. There’s something positive about leap seconds, as Wikipedia notes: “Between their adoption in 1972 and June 2012, 25 leap seconds have been scheduled, all positive.”
At the time of this writing (the day after) I cannot reach any of the sites on apple.com. Pure coincidence? Or a Leap Second Attack?
CoreLocation Background Update Messaging
Two years ago I put together revolutionary chart that detailed the flow of delegate messages when sending an app into background. This was even featured by Erica Sadun of TUAW because it for the first time visualized the whole process in a easy to understand way.
Based on this chart Carl Brown from PDAgent made an addendum to deal with the special case of background region updates and sent it to me. To my shame I have to admit that it was sitting at the bottom of my inbox for 4 months now and it is only now that in my effort to reach Inbox Zero I am dealing with this and putting it up here for your viewing pleasure.
Radar: Allow Overriding of User-Agent on UIWebView
Here’s another thing that I had discussed with an Apple engineer at WWDC. UIWebView at present does let you easily modify the user-agent header field that it sends to the server. We found this functionality sorely lacking when we needed to change the user-agent in iCatalog. There are some scenarios where the server-side browser-detection fails and you want to override the user agent for example with one to pretend the web view is desktop Safari.
This feature request was filed as rdar://11767306 and on OpenRadar.
iWoman 2.0.8
iWoman is approaching the end of support for iOS 3. This update fixes a minor bug and adds import/export functionality to allow you to move to a new iPhone that is able to run iOS 4 or higher.
Changes
– FIXED a bug that could lead to new cycles not being added to the cycle list upon pushing the Add button.
– ADDED functionality for importing and exporting your database to a text file which is accessible via iTunes.
The update has been submitted to Apple and will be released as soon as it is approved.
Linguan 1.1.1
The 1.1.1 version of anything is always something special. Linguan 1.1.0 brought the first new feature in the form of support for localizing XIB files. Linguan 1.1.1 now contains some hot fixes to address several inconvenient bugs.
Changes
- FIXED: Problem with invalid UTF8 characters coming out of ibtool
- FIXED: Broken Compatibility with OS X 10.6
- FIXED: Changes to the Toolbar did not get saved
- FIXED: Checkbox missing to enable/disable XIB support
The update has been submitted to Apple and will be auto-released once it passes inspection.
When reporting issues with Linguan please always create a small sample Xcode project with the bare bones contents to be able to reproduce the problem. This enables us to fix it all the more quickly.
Update July 6th: Update is now available on the app store.
Radar: Filevault2 uses incorrect keyboard layout for initial unlock
Fresh from our series “Another Day Another Radar” here’s one that stumped my associate Rene.
Since I’m getting a knack in filing these I did the “quick file” for him, as rdar://11738458 and on OpenRadar. As always I am doing this publicly because other people out there might have experienced the same issue which can be quite nerve-wrecking. Also this problem was observed on an OS X version that is public and widely used.
DTCoreText Case Study: NMSTC
Despite some advances in rich text support coming in iOS 6 my DTCoreText open source project continues to prove its usefulness. First and foremost it provides the ability to convert simple HTML text into attributed strings to give you the ability to retain full control over the display of the text.
I love to receive mail telling me about where in real life DTCoreText finds good use. Especially so if it is used for good, like by the Nottingham Multiple Sclerosis Therapy Centre info app. A case study.
