Reviews: Debugging and Write Portable Code

Two books I bought recently were ones I expected to be easy going. They were, but I think they were still worthwhile.

Debugging: The 9 Indispensable Rules for Finding Even the Most Elusive Software and Hardware Problems by David J Agans is about, well, debugging. Anything, not just software. It’s full of war stories from many domains (including cars, houses, and Sesame Street). The rules are how to logically approach problem solving, and make sure the problem is actually solved (rule 9). Most of it is common sense, but it doesn’t hurt to see it distilled. And based on the war stories, it’s easy to get wrong. Of potential use to non-developers: there’s a chapter on applying the 9 rules from the Help Desk, when you can't observe directly.

Interestingly, one of his war stories was kind of mentioned in...





Write Portable Code by Brian Hook. I’d had some dealings with Brian when I was at GameHouse, so I knew he knew his stuff. This book too was largely review (I’ve had to deal with getting code to run on different processors and compilers), but again it’s nice to have things spelled out sometimes. And I’d never heard of compile-time asserts or #pragma STDC before. Some of it’s a bit dated (version control in particular — and it must have been written right before the Mac Intel transition), but much of it is stuff you’d still have to deal with when moving between Mac and Windows — or even Mac and iOS. (Scalability is one aspect of portability.)

iPhone Release Swamps Yahoo?

Apparently there were some problems with AT&T activation when the iPhone 3G S went on sale today. (It took about half an hour to complete when I did mine.) But what I haven’t heard anything about is that apparently the Stocks and Weather applications don’t work — I haven’t done a big survey, but two other people (who didn’t upgrade) were unable to access them. And I couldn’t on either the new or old iPhone. What both have in common is that they connect to Yahoo:

I managed to connect once, but now it’s failing again.

MacBook Air Update

Looks like Apple’s MacBook Air Update does solve the issue where a core would drop out, particularly during Time Machine backups. (This didn’t happen when the machine was new, so I suspect it’s partly heat-related — its onset coincided with warmer weather.)

Security Update Broke FogBugz

[Warning: highly technical post, partly so I can find this again if need be.]

I just installed the latest security update (2008-005) on Mac OS X 10.5, and while Fogbugz is accessible, it doesn’t seem like the maintenance service is running. (I can manually run the heartbeat to process e-mail.)

% sudo ./fogbugzmaintd start

FogBugz Maintenance Service started

% ps -A | grep fog

  124 ??         1:06.48 mono /Library/WebServer/fogbugz/Accessories/SearchTool.exe -server /Library/WebServer/fogbugz/Accessories/search.socket

 8546 ttys001    0:00.00 grep fog

% ps -A | grep php

 8549 ttys001    0:00.00 grep php

I guess it's likely that there’s a different PHP or something...

% which php

/usr/bin/php

% php --version

PHP 5.2.6 (cli) (built: Jul 15 2008 12:18:21) 

Copyright (c) 1997-2008 The PHP Group

Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2008 Zend Technologies

I changed a line in fogbugzmaintd to read

    (cd ${PREFIX}/Accessories; nohup /opt/local/bin/php -d max_execution_time=0 -d allow_call_time_pass_reference=Yes ./fogbugzmaintd.php >/dev/null &)

and it seems fine.

Not that Cuil

There’s been a bit of buzz of late over the new search engine cuil. I decided to put it to the obvious test — search for myself.

Google finds my personal site as the #1 hit, which seems right to me. Cuil found the A Sharp site — that’s my company, so it’s not a bad #1. And it chose the company logo to illustrate the search result. But it used the same company logo to illustrate the story below, about some football player.

There was also a mailing list message from me on the first results page. This was illustrated with a picture of two adult males. One of them might share my name, but has nothing to do with the web site that archived the mailing list.

For fun, I tried searching for “google.” The picture next to the #1 result (which was at least www.google.com) was a broken link…

So I think they have a ways to go on relevance, and need to make sure pictures are actually connected to the search result.

Syncing New Events From iPhone

I ran into a bug where an event I created on my iPhone ended up in a read-only calendar (i.e. one I’d subscribed to) in iCal.

After filing the bug (rdar://5319313), I played around some more and found a workaround.

I had chosen (via iTunes) to sync “All calendars.” If I changed the setting to “Selected calendars” and then checked all the calendars, new events created on my iPhone ended up in the calendar I’d actually selected.