The Obamas: The IAMA

by Benjamin Posted on February 22, 2012

This is why I love Reddit so much – so I know who Jodi Kantor is, I have seen her on the Daily Show and Charlie Rose.  There was some interesting info there but like all television or traditional media it was a very one dimensional set of interviews.  The same sort of questions, the same tenor in all the answers.

Apparently she also did an IAmA and a very thorough one at that.  People asked all sorts of questions and she responded with some very interesting answers.  I love the idea that ANYONE can take the role of a Charlie Rose or Jon Stewart and interact with people like Kantor in real time and asking questions in a colloquial manner that you can’t really get away with on national television.

I love new media – I love the internet.  Reddit shows the best of what the internet is about.  Real time information, INTERACTION, colloquialisms and irreverence.  It just feels more authentic.  Of course she was there promoting her book but more importantly than that she is promoting the purpose of writing a book – the exchange of ideas and information and the idea that knowledge is a discourse and not just a feeding tube of info into a persons brain.

Totally worth checking out if you like politics and are interested in a candid discussion about the Obamas and journalism: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/p9knf/iama_author_of_a_new_book_about_barack_and/

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Dr. Debugger

by Benjamin Posted on February 9, 2012

Here’s a question – is there academic research in the field of debugging and software maintenance.  I don’t mean things like ‘maintaining bad code is 10x more expensive than designing good code in the first place’ kind of things.

I mean has there been research into methods of debugging – whether certain tools are more useful than others, methods of finding bugs, etc

That’s a book I would read.  If you could demonstrate in a scientific way that certain methods are more efficient than others that would be a very useful tool.

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Terminating app due to uncaught exception ‘NSInvalidArgumentException’, reason: ‘Cannot create an NSPersistentStoreCoordinator with a nil model’

by Benjamin Posted on February 4, 2012

I’m putting the final touches on another iPhone app and am looking at starting another.  I’d like to reuse a lot of the code I have already created and more importantly all of the open source libraries I set up.  Doing this is quite easy – you can basically just copy and paste the directory and rename most of the files to your new project.

One file you will probably want to rename is your xcdatamodelid.  When you do this you run into the problem that your old core data store will not automagically migrate over.  Even if you rename this file and the references to it you will likely get an error like:

Terminating app due to uncaught exception ‘NSInvalidArgumentException’, reason: ‘Cannot create an NSPersistentStoreCoordinator with a nil model’

I haven’t found a great solution for this, but one workaround is to simple ignore this error.  Rather than try and rename the xcdatamodelid file you can create an all new model file and copy and paste entities from the old file.  It seems (from stackoverflow) that when you rename the model file in xcode it doesn’t rename it on the file system correctly.  By creating a new file it seems to set things up correctly – then you just have to copy over your entities (or more likely just start creating new ones them yourself).

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So I made an app

by Benjamin Posted on February 1, 2012

I was reading reddit one day and came across this post.

Seemed pretty cool – only problem was it was Android only.  People were asking for an iOS version and since the original developers didn’t have an iPhone I volunteered to make one.

3 days later this is what I had (with the help from a fellow redditor who is a designer):

It’s a pretty simple app – you point it at a barcode, it scans and figures out if the people who make that product supported SOPA or not.  It was surprisingly quick to develop and I got the chance to learn some new things – namely how to use the excellent http://zbar.sourceforge.net/ barcode scanning framework.

The app was submitted around January 9th, and is still under review by Apple.  At this point it’s somewhat academic as SOPA is essentially tabled.  Still, it was a cool project and it’s something I’m proud to have worked on.  I am looking for more hobby projects like this – nothing to make money off of but rather something which has the opportunity to make a difference, in a good way.

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Through the Looking Glass

by Benjamin Posted on September 18, 2011

It’s a funny thing about the Kindle – I find myself using book stores more as an index than a merchant.  I will browse around, flick through the ‘staff picks’ and mentally check off which books I want to download later.

I was in San Francisco over the summer and got the chance to visit City Lights Bookstore.  I’m in this mecca of literature, poetry and prose and all I can think of is how it’s so sad that I’ll probably never support another such institution again.

Reading on the Kindle isn’t great – it’s passable.  It’s still not as good as a book.  The other advantages, however, so vastly outweigh the dead tree that it’s not possible to go back to that era.  I don’t have to worry about finding places to put my books, carrying a heavy novel on a long flight or around with me as I travel.  I can sit at home and watch a Daily Show interview and within seconds of hearing someone speak be downloading their latest novel.

Some would be saddened, and I admit to a bit of melancholy about the tactile experience a good book has.  At the same time I’m a tech lover (certainly a bits and bytes lover) and what the Kindle hints at is absolutely wonderful.  It’s a better form factor – it’s a better experience – it’s just better.  I was very, very skeptical about the Kindle when it first came out (no thanks to it’s $300+ price tag) but at the prices they offer them at now it cannot be beat.

I for one welcome our new microcapsule overlords.  I’m excited by the idea that anyone, anywhere can publish and start earning a living with the written word.  This is the printing press for the world – anyone with access to a computer can now publish their work on the largest bookstore in the world.  This is a good day to be a writer.

As someone who is working at a magazine company right now I feel the writing is on the wall (…).  This is the future of publishing.  The internet was not the killer app when it came to publishing…eReaders are.  The internet is the infrastructure – it’s the Apple II to the Visicalc.  The internet lets me download the books at home but it’s the kindle that makes it possible to curl up on the couch and read them without eyestrain, without fuss, with that special thing that happens when you read good prose and the world seems to melt away as you tumble down the rabbit hole of human imagination.

 

 

 

 

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