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Author Archives: eschaton

Federation Stability and Starfleet

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

So, the Federation is “fully automated luxury space communism.” Of course there are people who just hang out and don’t contribute, but that’s OK! They don’t need to! But what do you do with the people who do need to? There are people who use the fact that they’re in a post-scarcity society to research, […]

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Lucky Dozen

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Today is my twelfth anniversary in Developer Tools at Apple! Still love it, too!

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Raspberry Pi vs SPARCstation 20: Fight!

Saturday, December 26, 2015

A couple weeks back, I tweeted the following: Turns out a Raspberry Pi now is about 6 times as fast as a SPARCstation 20 was 20 years ago. And a Pi 2 is more like 15 times as fast. I was a little low in my numbers, too — they’re more like 7 times and […]

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SBCL test failures on ARM

Saturday, August 15, 2015

For hacking/prototyping/fun purposes I have a few embedded systems laying around. For example, I have a couple of Raspberry Pi systems, one of the original Raspberry Pi model B boards and one of the new Raspberry Pi 2 model B boards. And on everything, I have the latest Steel Bank Common Lisp building. On my […]

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Sad…

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Cupertino is at one edge of the Santa Clara Valley, one of the best places on the continent to grow fruit. This display is in our Whole Foods, one of the (if not the) largest stores they have. All of the brands are local and don’t exist any more, because we paved them over in […]

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Milestone

Saturday, January 9, 2010

I’ve had my car for 10 years, and my odometer rolled over 100,000 miles earlier today. Time to start thinking about a new car! Maybe a Tesla Model S, in a couple of years…

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When to use NSOperation vs. GCD

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Mac OS X has a number of concurrency mechanisms, and that increases with Snow Leopard. In addition to run loops, threads (both Cocoa and POSIX) and operations, Snow Leopard adds **Grand Central Dispatch** (GCD), a very lightweight way to represent units of work and the style of concurrency they need, and have the system figure […]

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Welcome to Snow Leopard!

Sunday, September 6, 2009

Last week, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard was released! Snow Leopard represents a lot of hard work by a lot of folks at Apple and at seeded third-party developers, and it really shows. Now that it’s shipped, I can actually talk about some of the especially cool things this release has for developers.

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Rebutting Big Nerd Ranch on Objective-C 2.0 dot notation

Friday, August 7, 2009

The Big Nerd Ranch weblog has a new post about Objective-C 2.0 dot notation. They advocate never using it and they’re completely wrong. Given my reaction on Twitter, several people have asked me to write a more in-depth rebuttal. I’ve already addressed when and why you should use Objective-C 2.0 properties and dot notation in […]

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Using “en” instead of “English” for your Xcode project’s development region

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Various pieces of Mac OS X and iPhone documentation have said for quite a while that the “preferred” method is now to use ISO-639-1 (two-letter) or ISO-639-2 (three-letter) language codes codes for localization purposes. Out of the box, Xcode’s project templates still use “English” rather than “en” as their default localization. How can you use […]

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