Perceive Designs

Indie+Relief : All Revenue Will Go to Haiti on Jan 20.

eric — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 13:20:26 +0000

In response to the earthquakes in Haiti, Second Gear Software and Garrett Murray have teamed up to create Indie+Relief – a group of iPhone and Mac developers giving to Haiti.

I was a bit late to the game, so I’m not officially listed, but will be participating. All revenue (minus Apple’s cut) from Humidor and MyGarden for January 20th will be given to Yéle Haiti, an organization created by musician Wyclef Jean to help Haiti’s children.

Over 130 other developers are participating. If you need some software, go buy it now!

Finally Found the Error I’ve Been Looking for (or “OSX Error Code Lookup Tool”)

eric — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 19:29:25 +0000

In a recent project, I kept receiving a -10000 error in the console when running my app. Quite frustrating to say the least since the error description was useless, and Google wasn’t any help at all either.

So I was completely thrilled to come across the OSX Error Code Lookup Tool. Download, compile, and plug in your error code — it’ll give you something good back!

Cheater, Cheater Pumpkin Eater (or “Cheaters Never Win”)

eric — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 03:04:28 +0000

… at least I hope they don’t.

Seriously people, why are you paying for reviews?

Need a Programmer

eric — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 02:33:16 +0000

If anyone is looking for an exceptional .NET programmer, let me know. A good friend of mine needs a job.

Thank you, and good night.

Time per student (or “The Math is Very Simple”)

eric — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:40:56 +0000

An discussion I was a part of asked why homeschooling isn’t 6 hours per day and is more frequently just a couple, and how that can be effective as compared to public schooling.

The math is very simple:

Public school: average of 180 school days. 30 students per class 6 classes per day 45 minutes per class

Total time the teacher can spend with each student per day: 1.5 minutes. A total of 4.5 hours per year.

Homeschool: Younger grades: 2 hours of school per day. 1 teacher 1 student

Total time per student per day: 2 hours per day.
Total time per student per year: 360 Hours.

The argument typically then turns to “but the parent isn’t always as educated as a public school teacher.”

Even so, I have to believe that the child getting 80 TIMES the amount of time with the teacher would outweigh (in most cases) the parent’s educational deficit. And the homeschool parents I know are active in learning what is needed anyway (I understand that is anecdotal evidence).

In fact, based on Wikipedia, 8.8% of Homeschool mothers (mothers are typically the parent that teaches) have a masters degrees, compared to 4.5% nationally. The same holds true for associates and bachelors degrees — homeschool moms more frequently have a degree. The separation is even greater for homeschool fathers, where 19.8% have a Masters compared to 5.4% nationally.

In short, homeschooled children on average get much more time spent with them per child, and the parents have higher education compared to the rest of the nation.

For those parents that can do it, and live in a deficient school system, homeschool is a good option.

Color Me Crazy (or “When a Color Isn’t Just a Color”)

eric — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:04:47 +0000

Ever need to use an image as a background, but can’t figure out how? It’s quite simple — colors aren’t always colors:


UIImage *patternImage = [UIImage imageWithContentsOfFile:[[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"patternImage" ofType:@"png"]];

[myView setBackgroundColor:[UIColor colorWithPatternImage: patternImage]];

We are a Billion Fragments (or “Removing URL Fragments with NSURL”)

eric — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:24:35 +0000

NSURL is a wonderfully powerful Cocoa object, bet there is at least one thing it leaves out, but I’ll show you how to fix that. URLs are composed of several distinct parts. Given the example URL of http://www.example.com:80/path/to/file/page.htm?key=val#foo this is broken into these parts:

scheme (http://)
authority (www.example.com:80)
path (/path/to/file/page.htm)
query (key=val)
fragment (foo)

You can read more about all of this in RFC3986. Today I’m just focusing on the fragment part.

Frequently, you have an NSURL object and may just want the URL without the fragment, to find distinct pages in a site for example.

This Objective-C category on the NSURL object does just that.

header:

//
//  PDNSURLExtras.h
//
//  Created by Eric Vitiello on 11/5/09.
//  Copyright 2009 Eric Vitiello. All rights reserved.
//

#import 

@interface NSURL (PDExtras)
- (NSURL *)urlByRemovingFragment;
@end

implementation:

//
//  PDNSURLExtras.m
//
//  Created by Eric Vitiello on 11/5/09.
//  Copyright 2009 Eric Vitiello. All rights reserved.
//

#import "PDNSURLExtras.h"

@implementation NSURL (PDExtras)

-(NSURL *)urlByRemovingFragment {
	NSString *urlString = [self absoluteString];
	// Find that last component in the string from the end to make sure to get the last one
	NSRange fragmentRange = [urlString rangeOfString:@"#" options:NSBackwardsSearch];
	if (fragmentRange.location != NSNotFound) {
		// Chop the fragment.
		NSString* newURLString = [urlString substringToIndex:fragmentRange.location];
		return [NSURL URLWithString:newURLString];
	} else {
		return self;
	}
}

@end

To use:

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.example.com:80/path/to/file/page.htm?key=val#foo"];
NSURL *urlWithoutFragment = [url urlByRemovingFragment];

Nice and simple. Enjoy!

Come on Baby, Light My Fire (or “My Wife is Making Wine Bottle Torches”)

eric — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:08:51 +0000

My wife is making tiki torches made from wine bottles and selling them on Etsy. Check out her wine bottle tiki torch!

JCPS is crazy (or “Why We Homeschool”)

eric — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:35:02 +0000

Many people ask why we homeschool our son.

This is why

Magpie and Feed Encoding (or “Why are there question marks everywhere?”)

eric — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 14:45:59 +0000

So I’m working on a website that uses MagpieRSS for parsing a feed. The feed had those pretty quotation and apostrophes in it, but when Magpie parses the feed, they all get turned into question marks.

So, for future reference, you can force Magpie to parse the feed according to the encoding you need by setting a constant before calling magpie:
define('MAGPIE_OUTPUT_ENCODING', 'UTF-8');

That’s all. Your feed will look good.