There is a fair amount of complaining on The Internets at the moment about Objective-C and Apple’s choice to use it for the iPhone. Many newcomers to the ‘platform’ (if I can apply a singular name to Mac and iPhone development) are finding the language - and the Cocoa frameworks based on it - very confusing. Just how can a language with sooooo many square brackets! be at-all easy to use, after all?

This provoked some deja-vu. Hadn’t, my vague memories asked me, this complaining been done before? I seemed to remember some talk of an “alternate syntax” for Objective-C ...

This weekend, I cleaned out the ex-belongings of the previous residents of our flat that had been sitting in the sort-of-corridor-area outside our door since we moved in (if you’ve been in our flat, you’ll know what I mean). Amongst the waitressing clothes, semi-broken electronics and Christmas ornaments was this mysterious and highly dubious looking CD. With curiosity (and a healthy dose of trepidation), I played it today. I was mightily surprised.

It turns out that the clue to what’s on it is in the title, not so much the imagery.

For your listening pleasure: eMusic, iTunes (UK), ...

“Which one accurately depicts the way your software treats the user in the event of an emergency?”

From Jeff Atwood’s www.codinghorror.com. I am not sure I agree with the article completely, but I love the imagery.

In which a five-minute hack to put the current working directory in the title bar of the Terminal descends into hours learning the surprising arcanities of BASH.

Like most developers, I spend a lot of time at my computer living in Terminal (and the rest Xcode)*. I have what might be a strange tendency to open a new Terminal window for each new task, I think so that I don’t have to lose the context in my current window. This means that after I’ve finished doing something (or in the middle, when I look at the screen and my obsessive-compulsive ...

Taken when I opened my laptop in an Edinburgh coffee shop. I would guess that BT’s broadband people are pretty happy.