Alan Quatermain

“Dear Internet” by Tina Fey

From PerezHilton.com/Posted by jerkstore on Wednesday, 1/21/2009, 11:21 P.M.

“In my opinion Tina Fey completely ruined SNL. The only reason she’s celebrated is because she’s a woman and an outspoken liberal. She has not a single funny bone in her body.”

“Dear jerkstore,

Huzzah for the Truth Teller! Women in this country have been over-celebrated for too long. Just last night there was a story on my local news about a “missing girl,” and they must have dedicated seven or eight minutes to “where she was last seen” and “how she might have been abducted by a close family friend,” and I thought, “What is this, the News for Chicks?” Then there was some story about Hillary Clinton flying to some country because she’s secretary of state. Why do we keep talking about these dumdums? We are a society that constantly celebrates no one but women and it must stop! I want to hear what the men of the world have been up to. What fun new guns have they invented? What are they raping these days? What’s Michael Bay’s next film going to be?

When I first set out to ruin SNL, I didn’t think anyone would notice, but I persevered because—like you trying to do a nine-piece jigsaw puzzle—it was a labor of love.

I’m not one to toot my own horn, but I feel safe with you, jerkstore, so I’ll say it. Everything you ever hated on SNL was by me, and anything you ever liked was by someone else who did it against my will.

Sincerely,

Tina Fey

P.S. You know who does have a funny bone in her body? Your mom every night for a dollar.”

We love Rails, object-oriented programming, and refactoring. We use a process to develop applications to work faster, introduce fewer bugs, and enjoy what we’re doing. We blog, Tweet, and talk at conferences on these subjects.

I posted this on Twitter this morning, because I believe it’s good advice, but about 1 in 20 or so replies accused me of being selfish or narcissistic, or — worst of all — an Objectivist.

I’m not a big fan of getting into “Someone is wrong on the Interent,” but I wanted to clarify a little bit in a way that Twitter does not allow.

What I get out of this quote is this: if there is a toxic person in your life who does nothing but bring you down and hurt you, then you should respect yourself enough to remove that person from your life. Life is too short to maintain toxic and negative relationships.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t make an effort to work on building and maintaining positive, healthy, fulfilling relationships. It doesn’t mean that you don’t make an effort to be kind and generous and just take take take. It means that if you’re constantly “making up” or something like that with a person, you’re not in a healthy, fulfilling relationship. You’re in a toxic relationship, and time you spend maintaining toxic relationships is time wasted that could be spent — invested — into relationships that bring you joy and make you a better person.

Know and recognize the difference between healthy and toxic relationships, positive and negative people, and respect — and love — yourself enough to choose the ones that make you happy and inspire you to grow as much as you possibly can. People who drag you down because it makes them feel better about themselves are not worth your time.

Where I think people may have interpreted this as selfish or narcissistic is in the clumsy wording of people or activities “serving” you. I’d take people out of that portion of the advice and apply it directly to the forehead.

Or, you know, just apply it to the “activities” part and think about where you’re investing your time and energy — your most precious and limited resource — and what yo’ure getting back from it.

Summary: Just released RAProjectTools, a collection of Ruby and Bash scripts that make your life easier.

sync-resources / sync-resources.rb

The script in sync-resources.rb looks at your Xcode project, and finds a group named Resources. If it finds one, and the group itself is associated with a directory in your project — for example, Project/Resources — it will attempt to reconcile the contents of the directory with the contents of the group. Files added to the directory will be added to the Xcode group, and files no longer found will have their references removed.

It works well against projects with one single target. It’s possible to extend the script so it is more robust. The script uses the Xcodeproj gem from CocoaPods, and the appropriate Bundler magic is already set up for you.

Invoke sync-resources from the root-level directory containing your project.

next-version

The script in next-version bumps the version number by one. It works with Git Flow, the awesome branching model for software development, and AGVTool, Apple’s solution for software versioning.

It works pretty well if you are already using these tools. Remember to start this script from the develop branch, and it’ll make a new Git Flow release with the next version number.

Summary: Just released RATilingBackgroundView which implements a very simple UIView subclass that takes several background tiles, generates more if necessary, and scrolls them with the containing UIScrollView.

You’ll find RATilingBackgroundView in this project. It needs a delegate to work. Do these things to start using it:

Drop the project into your app as a static library dependency.

Implement <RATilingBackgroundViewDelegate>:

- (CGSize) sizeForTilesInTilingBackgroundView:(RATilingBackgroundView *)tilingBackgroundView; - (UIView *) newTileForTilingBackgroundView:(RATilingBackgroundView *)tilingBackgroundView;

It’ll ask about the default size for tiles, and will also ask for new tiles whenever the bounds of its containing view has changed and it has no dequeued tiles to cover the area.

Optionally, set the stretching flags so you can use stretchable images for tiles.

@property (nonatomic, readwrite, assign) BOOL horizontalStretchingEnabled; // YES @property (nonatomic, readwrite, assign) BOOL verticalStretchingEnabled; // NO

If you don’t set any stretching flags, the tiles will be stretched horizontally to the same width of the containing view by default.

Summary: Just released RAReactionKit, which lets you do blocks-based KVO and key-path binding between objects, and handles premature deallocation cases gracefully without swizzling -dealloc. It is spliced from IRFoundations, which has grown too large to be instantly useful in any case.

There are three major parts of the Reaction Kit: Bindings, Observings, and Deallocation Monitors. The entire project is built upon ARC and mandates support for weak references. It does not swizzle your -dealloc methods, and work nicely with NSManagedObject instances.

Bindings

In NSObject+RABindings.h you’ll find these methods added to NSObject:

- (void) ra_bind:(NSString *)aKeyPath toObject:(id)anObservedObject keyPath:(NSString *)remoteKeyPath options:(NSDictionary *)options; - (void) ra_unbind:(NSString *)aKeyPath;

For now, the binding is strictly one-way. Two-way bindings are very interesting to have, though. :)

You use the binding mechanism like this:

[cell ra_bind:@"someView.elements" toObject:modelObject keyPath:@"someOtherElements" options:@{ RABindingsMainQueueGravityOption: @YES }];

There are currently two options keys:

RABindingsMainQueueGravityOption: If it is set to @YES, RABindings will take care to asynchronously set the value on the receiver from the main queue. If you have an non-atomic object that gets hit from all the places (mediated with a serial dispatch queue), this can be handy.

RABindingsValueTransformerOption: You can pass a RABindingsValueTransformer block:

typedef id (^RABindingsValueTransformer) (id inOldValue, id inNewValue, NSString *changeKind);

This allows you to do some very cheap value transforming, for example between NSDate and NSString.

Observings

In NSObject+RAObservings.h you’ll find a bunch of methods added to NSObject:

- (id) ra_observe:(NSString *)keyPath options:(NSKeyValueObservingOptions)options context:(void *)context withBlock:(RAObservingsCallback)block; - (void) ra_removeObservingsHelper:(id)aHelper; - (void) ra_removeObserverBlocksForKeyPath:(NSString *)keyPath; - (void) ra_removeObserverBlocksForKeyPath:(NSString *)keyPath context:(void *)context; - (NSMutableArray *) ra_observingsHelperBlocksForKeyPath:(NSString *)aKeyPath; - (void) ra_observeObject:(id)target keyPath:(NSString *)keyPath options:(NSKeyValueObservingOptions)options context:(void *)context withBlock:(RAObservingsCallback)block;

The main reason for exposure are two-fold:

The code was written by a more naïve version of myself

Observings are assumed to be frequently made and broken.

You use the Observing mechanism by invoking ra_observe:options:context:withBlock:. It spins up a temporary, private KVO listener which forwards incoming communication from the Key-Value Binding mechanism to your handler block.

Deallocation Monitors

The Deallocation Monitor is provided in NSObject+RALifetimeHelper.h:

- (void) ra_performOnDeallocation:(void(^)(void))aBlock;

If you pass a block to -ra_performOnDeallocation:, the block will be called when the object is deallocated.

Please note that for static NSString instances (the @"" string literals you specified in code), or special cases like @YES and @NO, they will never be deallocated.

Generally, there’s nothing wrong with asking people to take responsibility for their actions to avoid social ills. Stop littering. Spay or neuter your pets. Vaccinate your children. Get up early enough to eat breakfast so you’re not so grouchy at work. If your diet is making you sick, change it....

I’ve been playing Catan for years and it was nice to see it featured on Tabletop. Being the father of a rapidly evolving, small humanoid, I of course want to start impressing upon him my love of board games.

I Misspoke—What I Meant To Say Is ‘I Am Dumb As Dog Shit And I Am A Terrible Human Being’ (via wilwheaton)