I was working on some Cocoa programming, making heavy use of NSBezierPath. I wished there was an easy way to see just where my control points were ending up, and how the curves were being constructed. So I wrote a category method to add such a thing to the NSBezierPath class. It is here for all to share.

Pop quiz: what does the remove function provided in the C++ STL algorithm package do?

std::remove( list::iterator begin, list::iterator end, T& t );

Simple question, surely... Your answer?

I tracked down a subtle little bug the other day. My code was crashing on a line that should never crash (and we've all heard that one before!). It arose from doing two quite innocuous things, but when combined - disaster! I decided to write it up as an example to my 3 readers and Google.

I use Subversion on a daily basis, and Mercurial a few days a week. I have noticed that Mercurial seems to be faster with a lot of common operations, but I figured it wasn't a fair comparison as Mercurial was always operating locally, while Subversion has to hit the network for many (but certainly not all) operations.

So I decided to do some very rough performance comparisons on a local repository. And after some quick timings of common operations, this is what I found...

(Updated: fixed table and added graph.)

There are so many fantastic Aussie bands out there now (some from my home town of Melbourne). Some of my favourites I've been listening to recently:

• Gotye
• Borne
• Bob Evans
• Angus & Julia Stone
• Clare Bowditch and the Feeding Set
• The Hampdens
• Sarah Blasko

The Cocoa view class NSOpenGLView, which automates all the initialisation required to provide an OpenGL context for drawing, is very useful indeed. It would also seem that aglUseFont is a nice simple way to load up a font to draw some text in your view. So long as it isn't the aforementioned NSOpenGLView, that is.

Scary - and oh, so true:

• Abject-Oriented Programming

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll panic when you read about some of your own transgressions.

Yojimbo

Product:

Yojimbo

Supplier:

Bare Bones Software

Price:

US$39

Summary:

A flexible organiser for keeping track of all the bits and pieces of information you might otherwise lose.

Read on for full review...

Every time I use GMail, I seem to make a mental note of the count of messages in my spam folder. And a while ago I thought it might be interesting to plot the count of spam messages over time, and see what happens.

Having long had a fascination for languages, both spoken and digital, I was very pleased when Peter Seibel came out with "Practical Common Lisp", which you can also find online. I read some of the online version, and liked it so much I went and bought the book. So if you're interested in learning this venerable language, I strongly recommend you to check it out:

• Lisp tutorial

Peter's writing style is very engaging and easy to follow, and manages to explain some highly technical aspects (and some rather arcane corners) of the language in a very accessible way. Given Lisp's academic roots, Peter goes to great effort to show how "practical" Lisp is, with a great deal of useful sample code.