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exploration of sound and music in west africa, particularly in the sahel region of mauritania, senegal, mali.
Mike Cohen
MacBook Air as a development machine
Last week I got a new 13″ MacBook Air as a possible replacement for my 15″ MacBook Pro. Although it has a slower CPU and less RAM, the SSD makes it almost as fast, and in some cases even faster. Applications launch almost instantaneously and disk intensive tasks are much faster on the Air.
Despite having a 2.1 GHz Core 2 Duo and 4GB of RAM, vs the MacBook Pro’s 2.8 GHz Core i7 and 8GB of RAM, the MacBook Air is surprisingly pleasant to use. If you travel a lot, the Air’s size, weight, and battery life make it a better choice than the larger MacBook Pro, unless you do a lot of graphic intensive work.
My primary work is iOS software development, so I need a machine that can run Xcode, as well as Photoshop to create UI elements. THe Air works surprisingly well with both applications. Since I have a high end Core i7 iMac, I’ve set it up to support Xcode distributed compilation, which makes it even nicer to use.
For distributed compilation, you need two or more Macs running the same version of Xcode and the same OS version. On your fastest machines, in Xcode’s distributed build preferences enable ‘share my computer’, and on the others enable ‘distributed building’. You will then be able to take advantage of the faster machine when building on any of the other machines.
Here’s how I set it up on my iMac to provide distributed build services:
Here are the settings on the MacBook Air to distribute builds to the iMac:
With this setup, the MacBook Air can take advantage of the SSD’s faster disk speeds as well as the iMac’s faster CPU. Of course when I’m away from my home network I can’t take advantage of that speed boost.
Removr 1.2 submitted with Game Center support
Remover 1.2, which adds Game Center support, has been submitted. It ranks players by score based on how many moves they used to complete a level and has 10 achievements.
Favorite albums of 2010
It’s that time of the year agin, so here are my picks for my favorite albums of 2010:
- The Suburbs – Arcade Fire
- Contra – Vampire Weekend
- Transference – Spoon
- This is Happening – LCD Soundsystem
- Odd Blood – Yeasayer
- Congratulations – MGMT
- Plastic Beach – Gorollaz
- High Violet – The National
- You Are Not Alone – Mavis Staples
- The Age of Adz – Sufjan Stevens
For next year, I’m really looking forward to The King is Dead by The Decemberists.
The cat is out of the bag
I can finally talk about what I’ve been working on for the last several months: Zipongo, a social app to encourage healthy eating & activities. We submitted it Monday and it was just approved. Download it from the app store here.
It has a database of common foods, brand name products, and restaurant foods including calories & nutrient info, calculates your target calorie intake based on your height, weight, age, activity level and desired weight, and provides a daily meal & exercise guide based on your individual requirements. It uses charts to show how your nutrient intake is above or below the ideal.
links for 2010-11-30
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If we refuse to be terrorized, if we refuse to implement security theater and remember that we can never completely eliminate the risk of terrorism, then the terrorists fail even if their attacks succeed.
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Neither the full-body scanners or the enhanced pat-downs are making anyone safer. They’re more a result of politicians and government appointees capitulating to a public that demands that “something must be done,” even when nothing should be done; and a government bureaucracy that is more concerned about the security of their careers if they fail to secure against the last attack than what happens if they fail anticipate the next one.
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A nice way to deal with having 3 separate versions of Xcode installed.
Removr 1.1 is ready for sale
Apple has approved Removr 1.1 only two days after I submitted it. Check for updates and beware of those yellow balls!
Removr 1.1 Submitted
I just submitted Removr 1.1, which adds one major new feature: Exploding Yellow Balls, which destroy any red or green blocks or bars they hit, but don’t affect blue pieces or balls of any color. I also made night mode an option, which is off by default.
Catching up
As you’ve noticed, I haven’t been doing much blogging for the last month.
I’ve been working on a large iPhone app that has been occupying most of my time. Thankfully it’s nearing completion, so I’ll be able to spend more time on other things. At times it’s been very frustrating working with teams in India & Romania, as well as San Francisco based developers, all in different time zones. Most of them work at night while I’m sleeping, so in the morning I’ll often find features broken or code changed in ways I don’t understand.
On my off time, I was able to do some work on Removr. The next version will be 1.1 and adds a major new feature: exploding yellow balls that destroy red or green pieces. I still need to design levels that make good use of it. I’m also planning to add game center support, either in 1.1 or a future version.
Yellow balls
Hmm…. I wonder what these yellow balls do…
