Mike Cohen

Tropical Storm Update

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We’re out of the cone for Tropical Storm Fay right now, although that could change. It’s going to hit the west coast of Florida and move in our general direction. We probably won’t get the worst of it, but we’ll most likely get lots of rain & some wind. We have a tropical storm watch and all schools in Broward County are closed.

Links for 2008-08-14 through 2008-08-17

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Links for 2008-08-14 through 2008-08-17:

Posted by Postilicious

LOLCats 1.2, with Zooomr Support

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I just submitted LOLCats 1.2, which will most likely be the last version. The major new feature is Zooomr support.

I’ve shifted my attention to the Official I Can Has Cheezburger app, which will use RSS feeds from that site & related sites. Most likely I will pull this application when I release the official one.

I’m also working on a more advanced Flickr browser (LOLCats was a proof of concept for it).

BellSouth Sucks

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For a long time, my DSL service has been very unreliable. As soon as it started raining, the connection would drop and it would go up and down every few minutes until the storm passes.

Today my phone service and DSL suddenly went dead. No dial tone and no DSL service. When I called BellSouth, they told me the problem was with my equipment. I unplugged every device and tested the line, but it was still dead. They can’t get anyone here until Tuesday, which means I’d be without internet service until then, which I require for my work since I telecommute.

Since I already have Comcast Cable, I called them and ordered internet service. They activated it immediately, so I walked to Radio Shack and picked up a cable modem. Less than an hour later, I’m back online.

Links for 2008-08-12 through 2008-08-13

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Links for 2008-08-12 through 2008-08-13:

Posted by Postilicious

TouchCode Rocks

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TouchCode is a set of iPhone open source projects that fill in some features that are missing from Cocoa Touch. The most useful part is TouchXML, which is a drop-in replacement for Cocoa’s NSXML* classes.

I was able to get the unmodified ObjectiveFlickr code working by simply doing a global search & replace of NSXMLDocument with CXMLDocument, NSXMLNode with CXMLNode, and NSXMLElement with CXMLElement. The result is less ugly than using NSXMLParser.

For the Official LOLCats application I need to handle RSS feeds, which I found to be exceptionally ugly with NSXMLParser. With TouchXML it’s easy. I can get an array of items with something like this:


NSError *err = nil;
CXMLDocument *doc = [[CXMLDocument alloc]
initWithContentsOfURL: [NSURL URLWithString: @"http://feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed"]
options:0 error: &err];

NSArray *nodes = [doc nodesForXPath: @"//item" error: nil];

Flickr Frameworks on the iPhone

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I spent the weekend modifying ObjectiveFlickr to work on the iPhone, which was mostly a matter of changing the response handling code that depends on NSXMLDocument. I was pretty much able to plug in my MCFlickrParser class, which I use in LOLCats, to create a NSDictionary structured very much like the XML document.

Yesterday I was informed about FlickrKit, which already works on the iPhone. FlickrKit seems more advanced, but it’s also a lot larger than ObjectiveFlickr. I created simple Flickr browsers using both frameworks. The FlickrKit version is 704k, while the ObjectiveFlickr version is only 148k. I’ve only tried it on the simulator and the performance seems about the same for both.

I will probably stick with OF for this project, since I would like to support Zooomr as well as Flickr and OF already seems to support Zooomr.

New attack on the right to vote

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One million Democrats attempting to vote in this year’s primaries found their names missing from voter rolls. WHERE THE HELL DID THEY GO?

Law professor Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and journalist Greg Palast are launching an investigation. We want to know: where are these votes? Who swiped them? How? And how do we prevent it from happening in November?

Find out more and see how you can help here.

LOLCats & App Store frustration

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After reading the reviews of LOLCats in the App Store, I’m seriously considering pulling it. That application has become a nightmare for me.

Some asshole put up an inappropriate image which they tagged LOLCATS, causing the application to display it. Even though that image has been removed, every single review mentions it. The application has NO control over what images are displayed – it simply uses tags. If someone uses the wrong tag, it will display their image. Remember, I DIDN’T TAG THOSE IMAGES. Don’t blame the application, complain to the person who tagged that image inappropriately.