waffle

Spot the error:

uuid_t uuid_now;
uuid_generate(uuid_now);
char *uuid_cstr;
uuid_unparse_lower(uuid_now,uuid_cstr);

The error is that uuid_cstr is not initialized. I was writing the original code up to uuid_unparse_lower by hand but then I got lazy and googled, and found that yeah, it was done that way. What I missed was that in every instance this was shown, they were using char uuid_cstr[37] and were thus actually initializing their string^Wchar array — 36 chars + the null — while I was just declaring a pointer.

This all boils down to that packing up services worked great in ThisService, provided you were lucky and the program ran in pre-zeroed space, or the application wouldn’t, when this was turned into a string seconds later, find the null string terminator and crash and burn horribly.

Whoops.

I fixed this (by also forgoing it for CFUUID) and, humble from experience and eager to shoot down anything else pre-emptively, ran and reran the wonderful clang static analysis program — earlier in the week that just ended, I proposed the name “clunk” but am now coming around to “mechanical Hosey” as well — on the source code for about an hour until most kinks were worked out. Then I updated some web pages in which process is still as embarrassingly manual as is the “memory management” in most Objective-C applications (unless you write only 10.5 applications), and I uploaded a new version and slapped “2.0.2″ to the side of it.

You are welcome to upgrade.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.

I’ve just about had it with forced, contrived, smile-at-all-costs optimism in my lifetime already. The next 130 or so days are going to be crap weatherwise. It’s going to be dark and cold here, and it’s going to affect the moods of everyone else, which means it’s going to affect me too because that’s how people work.

So about that, why would I want to force this destructive attitude on myself? Here’s my thinking: to each their own, but out of all these things, I can control one thing directly and that’s how I feel about things. I can be allured to grovel in the general down of this time of year… or I can take a slightly more relaxed attitude. What I’m going to do isn’t going to crap itself out by default, and despite the impending arrival of frozen water in peculiar molecular arrangements (though I was born in the midst of it, I’m not a winter person), I’m still pretty happy.

Despite what the the-corners-of-my-mouth-meet-in-the-back-of-my-head drones might tell you, the world doesn’t love you and everything is not going to be alright in the long run. (Nothing gets me more depressed than that brand of policy optimism.) Don’t smile if you don’t feel like smiling, but don’t mindlessly assume failure either. Just a kindly word from your author, who isn’t going to deprecate himself in this sentence or the next.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.

Cocoa knocked on my door. I opened, and it stepped in. It scratched its feet against the carpet and glanced down briefly. “Look…”, it went. “I’m sorry about the whole ‘C-based’ thing. Didn’t want to insist, but it was all I knew. You never wanted that, did you?” I nodded. “Here.” It handed me a package. “This is early stuff, alright? More like the way you wanted to do it. I mean, there’s no good autocompletion…” It flashed a smile, but something was different. “You noticed. Removed my braces… I think this is something you’re going to like.”

I’ve been trying MacRuby for the past few days — it’s Ruby, draped on top of the Objective-C runtime, so every Ruby object is secretly an NSObject, and everything else works just as you’d think it would. About twenty minutes in, to the extent that I love programming, I loved programming in MacRuby. It feels like the prelude to this post really happened. Everything I love about Ruby is still there. Everything I love about Cocoa is still there. I looked up about three sentences of documentation for reference. Everything just worked.

Well, mostly. MacRuby is a very young project, and it’s more ambitious than the existing bridges. (I’m not even sure whether it’s a bridge anymore.) It seems like the more code I write the more stubs I fall over. I can’t require 'json'. I can’t use variadic functions (and the method call syntax makes me wonder how variadic methods will work). Bytestrings are a mess and won’t work well at all — you’ve just got a string all of a sudden that will work just fine unless you want to get at its length or individual characters, or concatenate it somewhere unfortunate.

But these are details. If I had a penny for every time I’ve fell over some sort of project that was really solid in its implementation, but that I just didn’t like or couldn’t work in, I’d have so many pennies, I’d fill — oh, nevermind. MacRuby is the opposite of this in that it gets the fundamentals shamelessly right from the beginning. There’s still culture shock. The Ruby and Cocoa worlds are colliding, just as I thought. But in the meantime, I find I have to unlearn how bridging traditionally works in many aspects.

I wouldn’t switch over production code to this. I can’t. I’ve tried, as you might have imagined. It just doesn’t work right now. But the model works. As good as Objective-C is, I can certainly stand to see this improve over time. It’s brilliant.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.

Apple Developer Connection: Developing Cocoa Applications Using MacRuby.

Moreover, I advise that the iPhone software platform must be opened.