A co-worker of mine had trouble debugging his library in Xcode. For some strange reason, GDB would not stop at any of his breakpoints. He did the usual printf and NSLog to see if the code was even being called, and sure enough… it was. The only way he was able to fix it was … Read more
You can never test too often…. and on that subject, you should try to test early. Getting into the mood of writing test cases though takes away from the fun of actually coding. Recently, I have paid a lot more attention to testing and test cases than I ever had in my coding past. Reason … Read more
You should catch errors but be very careful about swallowing it and not re-throwing the exception. I have seen this in certain projects where exceptions are swallowed and the developer of the offending code never even knows that this happened. So months can go by without any testing, you are doing early testing … right?!… … Read more
Recently, I was looking at a bug report for an error that would only happen on one operating system. When I looked at the code… I had wondered why no one called this one out: char buffer[128] = {0}; // Some code here memcpy ( buffer, another_buffer, 128 ); // Some more code free (buffer); … Read more
I recently fell in love with TextMate. For me, programming 24/7, TextMate helps me edit files that would normally be a pain with the standard editors on the market. Now, with that being said, I started making a lot of Bash shell scripts to automate building projects with Xcode and delivering the binaries for testing. … Read more
A programming language does not enforce rules. It just gives you the means to tell a computer how to do something. In my previous job I saw how SQL was being mis-used and how there was a lack of design used in implementing certain databases. The language doesn’t guide you to creating good databases; this … Read more
In my office, I use a certain framework for unit testing. Setting up my unit tests are pretty predictable and have the same naming convention, no matter what project I apply the unit testing to. Now, when I looked over how I was setting up the unit-testing target, I saw that I am actually repeating … Read more
So, I was messing around with a Cocoa app I created to test out some imaging code I had created. The point of this code was to deliver a really large image in smaller tiles and the Cocoa app would take those images and stitch them together into one large image. Now, the code I … Read more
The Mac OS supports, and has for a long time now, methods for checking whether or not you have functionality available to you from the SDK or from a class that was built by another developer. This may be compared to COM, which is fair, but the implementation is much richer.
If you want to change what your host application is dependent on, without having to rebuild it, you can use the install_name_tool app for changing this: install_name_tool -change oldreference newreference appname install_name_tool -change /usr/lib/libItsAllAboutMe.dylib @executable_path/../Frameworks/libItsAllAboutMe.dylib MySuperApp This is pretty useful for cases where you might have a dynamic library located in a static location, but … Read more