Sam’s Blog

I got yet another campaign email today from Howard Dean, head of the Democratic Party.  The subject of the email is “Devastating new Iraq ad,” and the entire email is him bragging about a negative ad directed at John McCain.  I watched the ad; it’s pretty stupid.  All it does is cast light on the fact that McCain has said we could be in Iraq for 100 years.  ”50 years.  100 years.  50 years.  100 years.”  I’ve included the ad below.  I really would have expected more from the Democratic Party.

I’m not saying anything about the content of the ad, but simply the fact that the Democrats seem to take pride in bragging about a negative advertisement really bothers me.

My dog died today. To be more specific, he was euthanized by a vet. I have really mixed feelings about this, because I am very anti-death penalty; and until today I was of the strong opinion that it’s better to let someone (or some dog, in this case) die naturally instead of forcing it prematurely. But Willy had not been well for some time, and apparently he had liver cancer. I’m not going to go into detail about what he looked like in his last moments, but let me just say that it looked that this was the end and there was nothing else that could be done.

Enough of the sadness of today; what are some of my good Willy memories? In his younger days he loved to lie on his back (with his belly facing up), and have people scratch his stomach. After we scratched it for several minutes he’d roll over to signify that it was time for us to stop.
He also would jump up on the dining-room table (or smaller tables as well), considerable jumps for a smallish dog, to grab tidbits of food left unattended. For example, I remember that at one point we left an entire pizza on the table that we’d ordered from some place, and then left the room for some period of time. When we came back the pizza was gone, and Willy was on the table. A more dangerous version of this scenario was when there were candles on the table as well as food: He’d try to eat the food, but then almost set fire to himself by walking to close to the candles. (Maybe even on top of them at some point; I forget.)
When we first took him home with us from the pet rescue agency, he would spend a lot of time sleeping on our beds. As he grew older and unable to make the jump up to the beds, he would sleep on the floor just beside the beds. I took a nap this evening, after the deed had been done, and then when I awoke found myself subconsciously checking for Willy at the foot of my bed — after all, I wouldn’t want to step on him as I got out of bed… I’ll really miss him! Whenever I (or anyone else in the family for that matter) was visibly sad, he would come over and be with whoever it was. Even when nobody was sad, he would often spontaneously drink lots of extra water from his water bowl so he could have a surplus to lick us with.
You should’ve seen his face (and who knows; you might have). It always resembled to me that of an English gentleman’s, not that I really had any idea what that meant. Really dignified. If you look at most dogs’ faces, they all really have a common shape/look. Willy’s was unique. That face made it really easy to think of him as not just any dog, but a person, odd as that may sound. I know that we still had to feed him dog food etc., and he spoke through barks and growls if at all; but he had a very unique personality.
He was with us for a little over seven years; since roughly February 1999. He became an integral part of the family; and he will be missed.

I am just now discovering Shark, and it is without a doubt one of the greatest programming tools ever!

Earlier today, as I posted earlier to the cocoa-dev list of which I am a proud subscriber, I read on MacInTouch that all of the icons on Mac OS X’s Desktop are actually windows — that’s right, real windows, just like you see when you click on the Finder in the dock. The speculation on the MacInTouch thread is that the mere fact that those windows have to be customized constantly; that is, kept hidden, somewhat transparent, etc., and there are so many of them on many peoples’ desktops (like mine for example), leads to a big performance drop in the Finder. That would explain why clearing off your Desktop by putting all or most of the icons into a folder on the Desktop is said to speed up your computer so much. (I verified this by using the Quartz Debug utility. I’d say more, but I have no wish to violate my NDA. For details check out the MacInTouch thread link above.)

I just found another interesting Finder “gem”: I was going through /Library/Preferences looking for something else, when I stumbled across com.apple.com.dockfixup.plist. That name seemed a bit curious, so I opened it up and you won’t believe what it is: All it does is keep track of which of the original items that came in my Mac OS X (i.e., that shipped preinstalled with the OS) are still in the Dock. It also keeps track of what version… well, I guess it started keeping track in: The version it’s got for me is 10.3, but I’ve had Mac OS X going back to 10.0. My guess is this is another performance inefficiency of the Finder: It probably looks at this plist every time Finder loads to see what changes it has to make to the default base Dock settings before it can continue the loading the Dock. I guess in a way it’s a good idea on Apple’s part, but there must be some better way to do this…

By the way, comments are welcome. I’ve had this blog running for months now and still have zero comments…

Why is it that we hear a lot about radical Islam, but when people talk about Christians with the same fervor of religious belief they call them “evangelical”? Maybe it’s because probably half the people in the Bible Belt, Bush included, would be “radicals” if we didn’t have this alternative term. Just something to think about…

I just received an email from Foreign Affairs letting me know that the latest Confidence in U.S. Foreign Policy Index has been released, so I took a look at their summary of the results and I’m sad to say that it’s only gotten worse since 2006… Guess why? Click here for details.

This article speculates that Leopard could mean the end of the while “windows” user-interface paradigm. We’ll find out for sure when Steve Jobs gives his WWDC keynote on June 11th. If Leopard really does turn out to mean the end of windows, I’m going to have to really put some serious time into thinking about whether it’s worth keeping Tiger support for this program that I’m working on now.

I just read this interesting article on nytimes.com that seems to disprove the wide-held idea that if you drop a piece of food on the ground, you won’t get sick if you pick it up within five seconds. Definitely worth a read.

This comes in handy… I’d been stuck for several days because apparently Scott Stevenson’s [item valueForKey:@”observedObject”] trick will only work in NSManagedObject, not a subclass of it. So I just guessed my way to this, which is now a method in each of my NSManagedObject subclasses:

-(NSManagedObject *)observedObject {
NSManagedObjectID *objID = [self objectID];
NSManagedObjectContext *moc = [self managedObjectContext];
id tmpObject = [moc objectWithID:objID];

return tmpObject;
}

So… yeah, I just changed the name of this blog from “My Semester Abroad” to reflect the fact that I’m posting about things other than Australia. Don’t worry though; I’ll still post some about Australia….