Fnord.

More progress on the Cocoa/Omron front…

It still just walks the USB tree and looks for the device, but now it’s a Cocoa GUI!

Cool. Easier to mix C and objective-C than I thought…

No, it’s not terribly impressive, and no it’s not a huge amount of work either, but that’s my first Cocoa GUI program, hacked just a bit from the example in the textbook. (Cocoa programming for Mac OS X, third edition.) Kudos to Kevin for the tip; Aaron Hillegass is an unusually gifted author and his experience teaching the material shines through on every page. Highly recommended.

I’m having a lot of fun with this. Objective-C is pretty simple for anyone with C, and 10.5 adds garbage collection. I was reading 2nd edition and hating the retain/release manual memory management, so auto-GC is a huge incentive for me. InterfaceBuilder is still complicated, but the book explains well so off we go!

I liked the combo of sign plus flowers.

For the JavaOne/MBARI trip, I took along my trust Omron HJ-720ITC pedometer.

This nifty little toy is a wonderful pedometer, and it saves up to 41 days’ worth of data onboard that you can download to your desktop for viewing and analysis. Unlike most of them, its based on an accelerometer chip instead of a tilt switch, so you can toss it in a pocket or bag and it’ll still count accurately. The included software is Windows-only, and I’ve not made a lot of progress in writing an OSX driver. I’ve gotten as far as USB bus enumeration and finding the device I want; it looks like all I need is to download and parse a single ‘report’, but anyway. Project page is here on googlecode if you want to help out.

Here’s a screenshot of the week of the trip, click for fullsize:

(That’s running on VMWare Fusion on my Mac, by the way.)

That’s a lotta walking! Over 12000 steps on two days, and 52 thousand for the week. Now you know why your feet are tired after a conference… It claims 30.4 miles, but I think I need to recalibrate my step distance, I doubt that I walked that far. Interesting regardless, I though.

I was going to post these as a normal album on the photos page, but for some reason they’re crashing bins, my album software of choice. I’ve filed a bug, but for now I’ll use the Wordpress album feature. Enjoy!

Update 5/24/08: Bug fixed, courtesy of those lovely Debian developers. Album posted here.

As with the G-shock, nothing tests an outdoor watch like The Anna Test. Her teeth didn’t leave marks, so it passed!

Today we visit to do paperwork. Quite bittersweet really.

 
Neighbor Ben Darby down the street is an artist (news story here) who has what’s got to be the coolest Honda ever:

I just had to share, a bit more uplifting than the last post.

This is really a post about two things, so bear with me. Cast your mind back a few years to Bush’s heyday and Medicare Part D, the infamous drug benefit. Due to pharma handouts and dishonest accounting now coming to light, they couldn’t afford real coverage and came up with the infamous ‘doughnut’ gap in coverage. From Wikipedia:

The plan requires Medicare beneficiaries whose total drug costs reach $2400 to pay 100% of prescription costs until $3850 is spent out of pocket. (The actual threshold amounts will change year-to-year and plan-by-plan.) 

I have to assume that the soulless bastards who came up with this consciously refused to consider the human stories of suffering and tragedy it would inevitably cause. I consider this a prime example of ‘getting captured by a large system and the rationalizations that ensue.’

Stories like… but I’m getting ahead of myself. The other thing this post is about is ‘Weblogs that I enjoy’. Allow me to introduce you to the self-proclaimed ‘Drugmonkey‘, an anonymous, foul-mouthed, cynical, liberal pill peddler at some large pharmacy chain. He has most excellent stories and I highly recommend him. As with some of my favorite blogs, he gives you a glimpse into another world. The title of his blog is ‘Your Pharmacist May Hate You’, which gives you some idea of the content…

Today, I was clicked through to his site and reading some old stories when I found this one. He used to call himself ‘drugnazi’, and it explains why he changed. Go read it; it’ll simultaneously move you to tears and also to find the asshats of Part D for a serious beatdown.

‘Compassionate conservatism,’ my ass.

(With apologies to Bart Howard)

Yep, NASA is running a promo for their return to the Moon, where your name goes onto a computer chip. Nearly free for them, good PR, and kinda cool at the same time. Our entire family will be aboard, though this is the first they’ll hear of it.

Actually, you get a cool PDF with images and logos, nice piece of work:

Go here to sign yourself up!