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Open Knowledge
Jul. 17th, 2009
Jul. 16th, 2009
03:02 am - links for 2009-07-16
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We stock the following in forged steel, forged aluminum as well as wrought iron, cast iron, malleable iron, steel, cast aluminum, and brass: hand forged iron and wrought iron balusters, handrail, brackets, fittings (including pipe) and rosettes for staircases, balustrades or railings.
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SGPS has over 30 years of experience providing innovative concepts and creative problem solving to the live entertainment, touring music industry, special events, industrial trade show, convention, and motion picture production businesses</p>
With today's increased demands on technicians and designers SGPS created ShowRig to specifically service the rigging needs of the production industry, apply the engineering, design and fabrication experience gained in these markets.
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DIY CNC machine
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DIY High-Speed Book Scanner from Trash and Cheap Cameras
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I recently developed a system that uses a 100 watt CO2 laser in combination with a CNC table to cut 1/8th inch thick carbon or stainless steel.
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This double-sided acrylic adhesive film is perfect for attaching photos, diagrams, letters, etc. to your Science Project poster board with no muss or fuss!</p>
The film is acid-free, heat resistant, transparent and won't yellow over time. Allows for edge to edge coverage, is tear resistant and bonds instantly.
Turn anything into a sticker! Just cut, peel and stick! Use with art & crafts, fabric, photos, wood, metal, ceramic and paper.
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Handcut hexagonal carpet tiles
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Electric carpet cutter
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Carpet installation requiring residue-free removal. Convention & Trade show applications.
Holding and mounting uneven surfaces. -
J.C.'s love affair with the conservation of American vintage furniture began out of necessity. Searching for a desk that was both practical and interesting, J.C. uncovered a run down 1948 tanker desk at a flea market. After stripping off many layers of beige paint, J.C. was taken aback by the raw steel gleaming underneath. This moment inspired him to start refurbishing other vintage steel finds. After making every mistake possible on his own furniture, J.C. perfected what is now the Twenty Gauge Process and launched his company, Twenty Gauge a year later. The process includes evaluation, thorough removal of corrosives, replacement of worn parts, industrial strength sandblasting, layers of powder coating and more. Each time consuming step is what guarantees that every Twenty Gauge piece will not only look fantastic, but will withstand the test of time.
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An ideal choice for backpackers, the Mountaineer carbon fiber monopods combinee the advantages of exceptionally low weight with strength and rigidity. They're 30% lighter than equivalent aluminum monopods, making the Mountaineer the choice for serious amateurs and busy professionals on the move. The 1588 is the largest diameter Gitzo monopod, intended to support the most difficult of handheld applications such as 600mm f/4 & 400mm f/2.8 telephoto lenses or even the occasional masochist with a penchant for handholding a large view camera
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I have been considering getting rid of my tripod this year. Actually truth be told my trustworthy assistant (AKA my wife) is unwilling to carry it on long hiking trips So I have been considering a Monopod. But I have had concerns about the stability of a monopod. But today I just learned about this new Monopod from Manfrotto the 685B. Now this monopod is self locking when you open it up and can hold up to 18 pounds, more than my cheap lenses weigh. It is cool because it has monopod stretches up to 65 inches and collapses down to 28 inches and pretty lightweight, perfect for hiking. Plus the suction cups on the bottom of the foot seems like it will provide a lot of stability. If the price is right I just might make a change.
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Home Security - Flashlight Baton - PR-19-6D
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Shown above in use with bases and adjustable uprights (SOLD SEPARATELY), these telescoping, heavy-wall, high-strength, anodized aluminum drape supports can be used at any length from fully collapsed to maximum stop length. Units with a collapsed width of 5' or longer can extend approximately one foot past the maximum stop. Drapes and drape supports should always be mounted and removed while the uprights are vertical; never tip the structure up or down.
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Standard Doughty Clamps are constructed from high tensile aluminium extrusion.</p>
The Standard Half Coupler (T57000) has been designed and developed in conjunction with the German engineering construction inspection service TUV.
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A few months ago a coworker held up the item pictured above and said, “This is called a cheeseborough.” I didn’t believe him, nor could I see any particular use for the tool. Later, I found out he wasn’t making up the term, and that all a cheeseborough does is clamp onto 1-1/4″ to 1-1/2″ pipe. And a few days ago I found out what makes this odd tool so cool.</p>
Last week some guys were prepping for an outdoor event, and I got to see ‘em put up an aluminum truss structure, made of tubing around 1-1/4″ to 1-1/2″ in diameter. I found out that with a cheeseborough and some pipe, you can hold almost anything. I saw cheeseboroughs used to hold ceilings, large fabric headers, plasma screens, and just about anything else that could be clamped down with it.
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Easyfit Structural Pipe Fittings are made of iron and are designed to make the building of handrails and pipe structures fast and easy. Using only simple hand tools, complex pipe configurations can be produced quickly and efficiently.</p>
Kee Klamp competitor. Might be cheaper.
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Harbor Freight’s structural pipe fittings let you connect standard 1-1/4″ OD PVC or steel pipe, and they cost a fraction of that of name brands like KEE CLAMP. They’re also galvanized to resist rust. Attaching the structural pipe clamps involves tightening a single hex drive screw per connection. Of course, you still have to supply the pipe, but you can score 1-1/4″ PVC or steel pipe on the cheap at most big box stores.
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How to bend plywood
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Bending plywood, also known as Flexply, Wacky Wood and Wiggle wood, is normally made out of hardwood imported veneers with the layers all running in one direction, this allows bendability to the panel and can be applied on a curved radius.
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Yardley Products is a leading manufacturer of precision engineered threaded metal inserts for a wide range of fastening applications. Yardley inserts feature designs that "lock" them securely into plastic, metal or wood base materials. Inserts are available for a variety of installation methods including molded-in, pressed-in, threaded-in, thermal, and ultrasonic vibration.
Original: craschworks - comments
Jul. 15th, 2009
06:42 pm - Things that I would like to exist
Kee Klamp-like fittings for electrical conduit.
Escher-patterned carpet tiles.
Carpet punch for turning scrap carpet into carpet tiles.
Large-scale double-backed peel-and-stick adhesive film (dimensions of 24″ x 24″ and above) for affixing said carpet tiles. This probably exists, but I wasn’t able to find it.
Water jet cutter for under $1000.
Original: craschworks - comments
11:15 am - How 28 year old Japanese IT-consultant became a Riverdancer
Steps taken by Tokyo man made his ‘Riverdance’ dream come true
“…He quit his job – a momentous decision in a country where career breaks are almost unheard of – withdrew his savings of about $100,000, and flew to Ireland in November 2001.
Speaking almost no English, he ended up in Cork in search of a professor who “taught the history of Irish dancing”. Undeterred by the “difficult” local accent and racism (“kids threw stones at me and called me ‘Chinese’ ”), he hoofed his way around Irish dancing schools. All told him the same thing: he was too old.
The professor couldn’t help either, so Taka did what any sensible man in his position would do: he rented a flat in Cork and began practising in front of Riverdance videos – eight hours a day….”
Original: craschworks - comments
03:02 am - links for 2009-07-15
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Tamron applies the Di (Digitally Integrated) logo to lenses with optical systems designed to meet the performance characteristics of digital SLR cameras, and this 28-75mm Di autofocus zoom lens is no exception. Boasting revolutionary downsizing XR technology, the lens is among the smallest and lightest models in the history of fast zoom lenses. In fact, it looks just like an ordinary standard zoom lens, but offers a fast constant maximum aperture that will reshape your photographic horizons. Specific details include a constant maximum aperture of f/2.8, a minimum focusing distance of 13 inches, and a rotation-type zoom. As with all Tamron lenses, the 28-75mm lens carries a six-year warranty.
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Constructed of 7075 aircraft grade aluminum the F16A offers up to 40% reduction in weight while retaining 98% of the traditional ASP Baton striking potential. Patented foam vinyl grip provides increased retention.
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Discussion of accessories to get with an AB800
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yes the Alien Bees and all exceptthe early "white can" White lightning electronic flash units use a Balcar based reflector, speed ring mounting system.</p>
Try Flashclinic in NYC ; http://www.flashclinic.com and ask them about using Balcar heads in the Elinchrom Octabank and what you'll need. http://www.fotocare.com is also a good resourse
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Now, this rig certainly isn’t cheap, but I actually think it’s a bargain, because if you get this one rig, you’re pretty much set for portraits (you’ll wind up using this one light and a reflector, and that’s about all you need). The Ranger Kit at B&H Photo (which is the flash head, battery pack, a hard case, and accessories), goes for around $2,029, and then you need the 74″ Octabank softbox itself, (which goes for around $1,100) and then I recommend a Matthews’s Hollywood C-stand to hold it all (for around $150, plus you should buy some wheels for it).
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I would also recommend buying an Avenger A420 rolling lightstand (I hang my Ranger RX Battery Back off the stand, as seen in the photo above), so the whole thing rolls around as one unit, without having to pick anything up off the floor. If this “hanging off the stand” thing makes you a bit queezy, you can buy a little shelf that will attach to the stand so it sits fla
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Links to interesting preparedness resources in the comments.
Original: craschworks - comments
Jul. 14th, 2009
03:01 am - links for 2009-07-14
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Jim Bishop spends decades building a castle
Original: craschworks - comments
Jul. 13th, 2009
03:01 am - links for 2009-07-13
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* Fully compatible to: Canon EOS-1V/1VHS, EOS-3, EOS-D2000, D30, D60, 1D, 1Ds, EOS-1D Mark II,III, EOS-1Ds Mark II,III, EOS-10D, 20D, 30D,40D, 50D, 5D
* 100 M range; does not require line-of-sight release
* 3-mode operation for shutter, sleep, and lock; locking function for bulb exposure
* Supports unique coding for anti-interference and avoiding wrong operation
* With rechargeable lithium battery and charging device that has LED indicator
Original: craschworks - comments
Jul. 11th, 2009
Jul. 10th, 2009
03:01 am - links for 2009-07-10
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Neat blog with lots of DIY ideas. Including elegant pot rack.
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f I had but one backdrop to use for portraiture I would choose a simple roll of white seamless paper. With one roll of paper you can create many options. For the rest of the week I’m going to break it down for you. We are going to look at getting it to pop to pure white, making it various shades of grey, getting it to go black, gelling it to any color in the rainbow, and doing very easy and quick changes in post production to further the visual options available to us when using such a simple background.</p>
As simple as it is, it can be easy to mess up too. I hope to help you out like other photographers have helped me along the way.Before we get into the shooting technique for this, let’s start from the start and look at the gear and resources needed to pull this off.
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This flame you CAN hold, without burning your skin off. Learn to make fireballs you can hold in your hand. This amazing video tutorial shows you how to do it. All you'll need for this little science experiment or fiery weapon is 100% cotton cloth, scissors, lighter fuel, cotton string, and a needle. Be careful to follow the directions in this how-to video carefully otherwise you'll really be playing with fire.
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An infinite white background is more than hip and trendy. Clean, professional and flexible, the secret is in the lighting. And while framing the head and shoulders is easy, lighting a full-body shot is much more complex. This segment shows you how to Light Infinite White, on a finite budget and in a limited space. Watch this video special effects tutorial and learn how to create infinite white lighting.
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A cyclorama is something I've always wanted. Until building my current studio I've never had an adequate place for one. So, like most of us, I've had to use seamless background paper-which I loathe. I've never seen instructions for building one, so I was forced to invent the technique demonstrated here. So far, everything seems to be holding up just fine. Be forewarned, this project is a lot of work, and the finished cyc weighs a lot-like maybe a ton for every 16' or so. If your floors and walls are not real sturdy, don't try this.
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World Press Photo aims to support professional press photography on a wide international scale. Promotional activities include an annual contest, exhibitions, the stimulation of photojournalism through educational programs, and creating greater visibility for press photography through a variety of publications.
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lens recommendations
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When I examine the vistor figures for my website going back to August 2000, I can see how many more visitors there are for the technique pages than any others. In fact, 68% of all page views on this site between August 2000 and August 2008 were to one of the many technique examples. I don't suppose that is going to change any time soon so this page provides an index to all of the new technique pages posted since the 1st of September 2008.
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This DIY aluminum laptop stand was initially made by Aaron Kravitz and was inspired by a $50 model he once saw. Needless to say that this is one sexy laptop stand, one of the nicest I've seen. On top of being nice, it's also dirt cheap. All in all, he used about $8 in metal, a hacksaw, and a few strips of leather. To bend the aluminum, he used his hands and a sawhorse. Aluminum was chosen due to its malleability. Kravitz admits that he mostly eyeballed the bending. They turned out well and since you only need to bend one, it doesn't really matter which way you do it. The important thing is that there are these struts that support the stand.
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16 port USB hub
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Transformer USB drive
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Esto connectors are available in 1" square and 3/4" square to fit a variety of tubing profiles. They are manufactured using super tough, high quality molded nylon material. Standard colors include light-grey and black. Custom colors are also available.
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Dynamic moving backdrops with very high resolution</p>
visual projected images, perfectly sychronized to the
live stage actions, lighting and music. This long awaited stage
set dream is now a reality with the introduction of
networked picture servers which integrate all forms of
visual content onto one seamless stage backdrop to produce
the ultimate "Virtual Set". Artistic murals, Still images,
Photographic images, Moving icons, Corporate branding,
Video footage are all possible elements which can now be incorporated into your next stage production.
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This is the evolution of the first DIY guide to something bigger. Now included are hints and guides for setting up and running a studio. This guide is not yet finished, and probably never will be finished at all, but it will be constantly updated if I find time. Any useful suggestions for updates and complements are gladly received and will be integrated if possible. Just send e-mail. The German original is available at http://www.photoquack.de/tutorials/baust
rahler.htm -
Does some interesting photography with continuous lighting
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Make your own “Dim-able” Keno-Flo for $49!
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DIY Large Softbox for Small Strobe 100cm x 60cm (with build instructions) on Flickr - Photo Sharing!Build instructions for DIY softbox
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DIY Spiderlite softbox
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Metal connectors should theoretically make your building go up faster and stronger. With much of the items listed here a person needs to use their imagination to finish off the project. Meaning for example you can make a simple design on paper for a small dwelling or tent and use accessories available from the listed suppliers to provide framework connectors or to provide maybe a canvas or poly covering.
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EnableDesign has built a number of these beds. The bed provides security and safety.
The bed is sized to fit a standard single size mattress. The overall height of the bed is
approximately 80 inches. The door and end panels have mesh covering in the openings.
The doors slide in tracks and function much like a standard bathtub enclosure. The mattress
is low to provide easy access. Custom requirements can be accomodated. -
Metal security storm doors need not give your home an institutional appearance. With over 50 decorative style and ten colours to choose from, these beautiful protective security doors can in fact enhance the curb appeal of your home, while protecting your family and belongings from unwanted intrusion.
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Hand forged wrought iron doors; also fake wrought iron
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Jay Leno has a lot of old cars with a lot of obsolete parts. When he needs to replace these parts, he skips the error-prone machinist and goes to his rapid prototyping 3D printer. Simply scan, print and repea
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Jim's shop is located near his home in Circle Pines, Minnesota, near the "Twin Cities" of Minneapolis and St. Paul. If you have a serious interest in Jim's instruments and you expect to be in the Twin Cities area, contact Jim to plan a time to visit. It is not unusual for prospective customers to make a trip to the shop to see how Olson guitars are made, and to take a "test drive" on a recently completed guitar. All visitors leave Jim's shop amazed at the number, intricacy, and precision of the tools and jigs he has created to help him make the best guitars possible.</p>
For those unable to visit in person, this corner of the web site offers a "virtual tour" of Jim's shop. The tour is a bit brief right now, but we have about 100 photos that will be added gradually over the next few months. So enjoy your virtual visit, and drop by again soon to see more.
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As the name suggests, a blog for expats in China
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Magma Kettle barbecues are nearly ubiquitous throughout North American cruising grounds. I've owned one for a couple cruising seasons now, and I've learned a lot about the ups and downs of these units.</p>
Let me say right off that this grill has enhanced our cruising experience more than any other single improvement. Moving cooking operations out to the cockpit removes the steam, splatter, and spills from the cabin entirely.
Even more significant, though, is the elimination of the bottleneck at the cabin door, which is where the galley is. The rest of the crew can come and go as they please while I cook astern. It sounds silly, but cooking out back seems to make the boat physically larger. On a 22 foot boat, a change like this is almost as good as buying a boat three feet longer.
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Obama and his Senate allies would limit competition by requiring insurers to cover everyone for the same "fair" price. No "cherry picking," the president says. No charging healthy people less.</p>
They call this "community rating," and it sounds fair. No more cruel "discrimination" against people who have a preexisting condition, obese people or smokers. But such simple-minded one-size-fits-all rules take from insurance companies their best price-dampening tool: Risk-based pricing encourages people to take better care of themselves, just as car-insurance companies reward good drivers. With one-size pricing your car-insurance company must give the town drunk the same deal it gives you.
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[The same people who want to operate a national healthcare system can't even run their own cafeteria profitably.]</p>
Year after year, decade upon decade, the U.S. Senate's network of restaurants has lost staggering amounts of money — more than $18 million since 1993, according to one report, and an estimated $2 million this year alone, according to another … without a $250,000 subsidy from taxpayers, the Senate won't make payroll next month….
In a masterful bit of understatement, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chairman of the Rules and Administrations Committee, which oversees the operation of the Senate, blamed "noticeably subpar" food and service.
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Scred is a Finnish company building tools and services to help friends, groups and communities manage their money, wherever they are.</p>
Pools are for simple tracking and balancing amongst friends, while MiniCorps allow you to track income and expenses, as well as actually sell items and receive money.
Original: craschworks - comments
Jul. 8th, 2009
03:01 am - links for 2009-07-08
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general Informations and Key shortcuts for Kent Sibilev's great ruby-debug gem. http://www.datanoise.com/ruby-debug/, http://rubyforge.org/projects/ruby-debug/
A reference manual for version 0.10.0 is at http://bashdb.sf.net/ruby-debug.html
Original: craschworks - comments
Jul. 7th, 2009
09:58 am - Does Medicare have lower administrative costs?
…only an extremely small portion of administrative costs are related to the dollar value of health care benefit claims. Expressing these costs as a percentage of benefit claims gives a misleading picture of the relative efficiency of government and private health plans.Medicare beneficiaries are by definition elderly, disabled, or patients with end-stage renal disease. Private insurance beneficiaries may include a small percentage of people in those categories, but they consist primarily of people are who under age 65 and not disabled. Naturally, Medicare beneficiaries need, on average, more health care services than those who are privately insured. Yet the bulk of administrative costs are incurred on a fixed program-level or a per-beneficiary basis. Expressing administrative costs as a percentage of total costs makes Medicare’s administrative costs appear lower not because Medicare is necessarily more efficient but merely because its administrative costs are spread over a larger base of actual health care costs. When administrative costs are compared on a per-person basis, the picture changes. In 2005, Medicare’s administrative costs were $509 per primary beneficiary, compared to private-sector administrative costs of $453.
Via Greg Mankiw
Original: craschworks - comments
09:47 am - Best books on design/aesthetics?
What books on design or aesthetics do y’all like? The one that comes immediately to mind for me is Edward Tufte’s Visual Display of Quantitative Information. I also liked Design of Everyday Things.
What else is good? What’s the graphic designer’s bible? Specialist titles (for example, design of typography) are also welcome.
Original: craschworks - comments
03:01 am - links for 2009-07-07
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For new programmers, debugging errors associated with pointers can be a nightmare. "Segmentation Fault (core dumped)" is a pretty vague error message, and it's even worse when strange bugs start appearing that don't cause segmentation faults — but that result in things like memory getting overwritten in unexpected ways.</p>
But finding problems with pointers is easier than you'd think. Those segfaults often turn out to be among the easiest bugs to find, and using special tools such as Valgrind, even finding buffer overflows is simplified.
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This post introduces messaging within Objective-C. Messaging is the terminology for invoking methods on an object. The format for a message expression is as follows (the brackets are required):</p>
[object method]
or in Objective-C parlance
[receiver message]
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I got bitten today by the fact that Objective-C strings in Cocoa programming are not the same things as plain old C strings. The problem is that Objective-C is essentially an object-oriented veneer on top of plain old C; sometimes it matters that you remember this, and other times it doesn’t. This was one of the times it mattered.
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Profile Objective-C code with Shark
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It is therefore vital that you have accurate information on exactly where the time is being spent within your applications — and for real input data — if you hope to have a chance of optimizing it effectively. This activity is called code profiling. This article introduces a profiling tool provided with the GNU compiler tool chain, the imaginatively named GNU profiler (gprof), for those who are relatively new to open source development tools.
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Warning: This post is longer than my usual. You may want coffee. The focus of this post is how to make a DMG image with a background in an automated fashion.</p>
About DMG
For those who are reading this who are not aware of it, DMG (Disk Image) is the format commonly used to distribute software on OS X. There are other formats, the more traditional like tar.gz/zip/.sit. For more information specifically about how to distribute software as a DMG, you'll want to read Peter Hosey's how to distribute your software (and his semi-in-depth overview of compression format usage on OS X). -
So you want to get/post to an https url using ssl, certificates, pem and ruby ?
Original: craschworks - comments
Jul. 6th, 2009
04:02 am - links for 2009-07-06
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Big Nerd Ranch Europe, premier provider of intensive classes for programmers, is pleased to announce three of its flagship courses on Mac OS X. The whole month of February is dedicate to learning Cocoa programming for Mac OS X, developing applications for the iPhone and leveraging the powerful Unix foundation of Mac OS X along with learning advanced Cocoa programming techniques for professional developers.
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In part 1 and part 2 of this series, we looked at the core of the Objective-C language, defining classes, creating objects, and sending messages to them. This final article covers the more advanced parts of the language.
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5 star barber on Yelp
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After completing the first stages of program development, like design and debugging, you can use performance tools such as Saturn to help optimize your program. Saturn helps you understand your program’s function-calling structure and how much time was spent in each function. Saturn consists of two parts: a graphical front-end and a dynamic library back-end. The Saturn back-end library leverages the instrumentation infrastructure in gcc to generate an output file that summarizes how much time your program spends in various functions. The Saturn front-end can then read this file and present a representation of the function calling patterns and a function tree view.
Saturn allows you to visualize the data in two ways: a traditional call-tree view and a graphical call-stack timeline. Using this information, you can eliminate expensive calling behavior (for example, deep call stacks which do not last long) as well as understand which functions take up the greatest portion of execution time -
Chances are, if you’ve developed any kind of Cocoa application, you’ve probably made use of Cocoa Bindings in one way or another, particularly when it comes to Core Data. The technology is ‘key’ to so many of the underlying frameworks but it is a technology that tends to be often-used but frequently not fully understood.</p>
If you are someone who happily binds Array Controllers and View objects together using Interface Builder but have always wondered discretely exactly how the magic behind the scenes happens, or if you just don’t quite comprehend the difference between ‘KVC’ and ‘KVO’ (or perhaps can never quite remember what they stand for…), this article might help you out. In it, I’ll attempt to demonstrate a ‘faux-bindings’ methodology that connects a value from one object with a value from another object, but without using the actual Apple Cocoa Bindings technology. The bare-bones of how the ‘faux binding’ works will be there for all to see; while the internal workings of Cocoa Bin
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If your application could benefit from improved performance—and let's be honest, most can—you need to know about Shark 4, the latest update to Apple's remarkable performance optimization tool. Shark enables you to very quickly identify where your application's performance problems lie, down to the specific functions on which you should concentrate your optimization efforts. You can then focus on the fixes that will yield the maximum benefits. Developers using earlier versions of Shark have found and fixed problems that improved performance dramatically, in a matter of hours.
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Cutest hedgehog ever.
Original: craschworks - comments
Jul. 5th, 2009
03:01 am - links for 2009-07-05
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TinEye is a reverse image search engine. You can submit an image to TinEye to find out where it came from, how it is being used, if modified versions of the image exist, or to find higher resolution versions. TinEye is the first image search engine on the web to use image identification technology rather than keywords, metadata or watermarks. For some real TinEye search examples, check out our Cool Searches page.
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This provocative 14-piece porcelain coffee set was made in Spain exclusivley for the New Museum. The crimson handprints and smears are an almost Baroque reflection on the act of consuming a meal. Edition of 15.</p>
$500.00
Original: craschworks - comments
Jul. 4th, 2009
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