SwampFoetus.net

Apple Drop Core Data Assistant – Thanks!

swampf0etus — Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:48:29 +0000

Apple released XCode 4 and every XCode 3 programmer moaned ‘you’ve ruined it!’. But I said ‘stop moaning and get used to it. It’s not that different!’. Until now.
While going through the book Learn Cocoa on the Mac (which is very good, by the way), I came to a stumbling block at Chapter 7 – Core Data Basics. Basically, the book was written for XCode 3 but I’m on XCode 4. There was no problems with this until chapter 7, where I found that Apple had decided to remove a huge chunk of functionality: the Core Data Interface Assistant.
This was a brilliant time saving tool that created a user interface from a database design in just a few clicks of the mouse. It’s now gone and Apple just seem to be pretending it never even existed. There’s no reference to it in any of it’s XCode 4 documentation, not even the transition guide, which is specifically aimed at those experienced in using XCode 3.
I tried Google, of course, and found a load of other people in the same boat. The answer to these people’s questions? “you’re shafted!”
So, to move on, I had to work it out myself. If you’re interested in how I did it then read here.
But, Apple, if you’re listening, please don’t remove any more useful tools. I really don’t want to find myself writing “Where’s Interface Builder Gone?”

I Haz Tar File Corruption

swampf0etus — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 18:50:40 +0000

When is a text file not a text file? When it’s a tar file that’s overwritten the original text file, because someone forgot to specify the archive name with the -f option.
When is a tar file not a tar file? When someone treats the tar file like a text file, adding and removing text to and from it.
These are the problems that I had to resolve last week, driving me mad at every turn. I now, however, know the tar archive format like the back of my hand.
To try and even begin to understand what a pain this was, think of the scene in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. The one where Clark Griswald hands his son a hugely entangled ball of Christmas lights and ask him to untangle it. Although we don’t see Rusty untangle the lights, it’s obvious that his experience would be a living hell. If it wasn’t then you wouldn’t find the scene funny. My scene, however, was not funny because, although like Rusty I had to tackle a living nightmare, my scene was reality. My reality. And I believed the contents of those mangled tar files to be a lot more important than Christmas decorations.
Believed. Yes, I’ll say it again. Believed. Because after all my hard fought un-mangling, after days of writing and re-writing Perl scripts, what was I to discover? That what was in this mangled pile of crap was just stuff that either I already had or stuff that I didn’t need. Brilliant!
So, did I gain anything, anything at all from this? Well I know how tar files are laid out. I know how to fix them. And I have few scripts to do all this. Scripts that got so incredibly complicated, yet ended up so simple once I understood the extent and detail of the corruption.
I do look back and think “I think I actually enjoyed some of that” (except for the dreams, of course. The horrible dreams of 512 byte block alignment). But, yes, overall I gained something. And, no doubt, I’ll need to call on this knowledge again. But one thing I’d like to say is this, “don’t forget how -f works or you’ll be untangling Christmas lights until after Easter”.

Swampf0etus is back!

swampf0etus — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 19:43:19 +0000

After over a year-long wait, swampfoetus.net is back. Not that there’s much to return from, or return to for that matter.
So, “what’s this site about?” I hear you ask. Nothing yet, but there’s much to come. Watch this space…