David Dunham in History

Apparently I have a famous namesake, whom Dunham Place in Brooklyn is named for. (Thanks to Ian Lynch Smith for the pointer.)

King of Dragon Pass Walkthrough

What a blast from the past! Kalle is posting a walkthrough of King of Dragon Pass in the Quarter To Three Forums. Frankly, I think we probably should have done something like this instead of the marketing we did try. I think it really brings the game alive.

It’s worth mentioning that the game is still available from A Sharp.

I notice that at least one of the team has commented in the thread. As he pointed out, most of the team members are illustrated in the game; it was like going through a photo album seeing their pictures again. (And cool to see the one of the illustrations I have hanging on my wall.)

Thanks Kalle! And thanks to those who’ve ordered the game because of this. I’m really happy that new players can discover it.

Macally AIR2NET (USB Ethernet adapter)

I decided I wanted to get another USB Ethernet adapter for my MacBook Air, since backup (over 802.11n) sometimes takes way too long. Amazon listed Apple’s adapter, but also the Macally AIR2NET, which I decided to take a chance and order.

So far so good. I just plugged it in. The MacBook Air recognized it, and considered it separate from my Apple adapter (which makes sense, as they should each have a unique MAC address). I then noticed that I was supposed to install a driver. Since the device was working, I decided not to. (I tried contacting Macally to find out what the driver actually did, and while they gave a prompt answer, it was confusing.) My guess is that you do need the driver if you’re running an earlier version of Mac OS X (or presumably Windows), and that the driver is still compatible with 10.5.

One reason to have a USB Ethernet adapter is for travel, when you can’t guarantee finding a WiFi signal. (Or for places like my office, where WiFi is not the internal network I need to access.) Unfortunately, the AIR2NET is a lot bigger than the Apple adapter. Fortunately, I have my choice of which to travel with.

On the other hand, it seems to run a little cooler than the Apple adapter. And it has flashing lights, which might be useful if there’s a problem.

Both devices only support 100 megabit Ethernet, and it’s not yet clear that it will make a difference in backup speed. (My other machines do backup a lot faster via Ethernet, but I’m not sure where the real delay lies.) But the device does seem to work as advertised

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.

Clang Static Code Analysis Rocks

Wow. I’d seen Quentin Carnicelli’s note about the Clang static analyzer, but my first attempt to use it was on a C++/Objective-C++ project, and all it did was find potential problems in open source libraries. Turns out it doesn’t really have a C++ parser yet.

Today I tried it on an Objective-C project, Opal. Pay dirt! It found a number of memory leaks (some in code that’s not released yet, but some in code that I didn’t exercise while looking for leaks, such as printing with headers). One of the reported leaks was actually a false positive, but the others were valid problems.

And dead store found some small optimizations (why calculate something you never use?).

The tool is trivial to use (just invoke it from the command line, it figures out your Xcode project from there), and really does find code flaws. Oh, and it’s free. I’m looking forward to being able to use with C++ code.

(It’s available pre-built for Mac OS X developers. Others will have to build it from source.) If you’re using C or Objective-C, you should use it.

TXT TLK

The phone company sent a mailing which included a list of common SMS abbreviations. While I sometimes feel I should use them to be an authentic texter, with the iPhone’s automatic spelling correction I find it’s usually almost as fast and more accurate to type “see you” rather than “c u.”

(Besides, it gets my money’s worth from SMS by sending more data…)

iPhone App Store

According to Anita Hamilton in Time, Apple’s upcoming App Store will be “anything but a bargain. … Popcap (sic) Games … plans to charge $9.99 for its popular puzzle game Bejeweled.”

Um, but Bejewelled regularly sells for $14.95. (Bejeweled 2 is $19.99.) This seems entirely reasonable pricing to me: it’s cheaper to buy the iPhone version.

The one main difference, not touched upon in the article, is that the download (Windows or Mac) version is available as a free trial — you get an hour to try it out before being asked to pay. The App Store doesn’t seem to have any way to do this. Developers have informally talked about developing two versions, one limited but free, and the full version for sale, but this would give a much worse user experience than you get downloading a trial game for your PC. Hopefully Apple can resolve this by the time the AppStore launches next week.