iPhone Case
Since I got my iPhone I’ve been trying to find a suitable case for it. As I mentioned on Stephen’s blog back in July I was looking for a pouch style case. I wanted something a thin as possible but not something that was permanently on the phone. I don’t see the point of buying some thing with excellent design then wrapping it in some ugly case. I’ve been dropping into phone shops now and then to see what cases they’ve got but hadn’t found anything compelling until this week. I saw that TeleChoice seemed to have what I was looking for, it also happened to be a Mossimo case. There is one problem that I didn’t notice in the shop though.
Progress Update
Its been quite some time since my original post soliciting ideas for a Mac OS X application to develop. Since then I decided to heed the advice I’ve read in several places and to just implement something simple that I want. That ended up being an audio file splitter. The app is currently nicknamed Chopper, which aside from the obvious cutting meaning also has a bit of meaning in Australian culture as a reference to Mark “Chopper” Read.
In July I also changed jobs. As part of accepting the new role I asked to work a four day week, with the intention of dedicating the fifth day to Mac development. A day a week turned out to be too much but they did accept a day a fortnight, written into my contract, so I always get it.
With that day a fortnight I’ve done such things as:
- Come up with an overview of requirements
- Sketch out several possible UI designs
- Benchmark MP3 decoders
- Learn and use the new features in Obj-C 2.0
- Learn OCUint and add unit tests to the project
- Implement an MPEG header parser
- Implement MPEG file splitting
- Implement a CUE sheet parser
- Implement splitting on CUE sheet track boundaries
- Hook up a basic UI that uses bindings
The todo list is still quite large. I will continue plugging away and one day it will be ready. In the meantime I’m aiming to post more frequent updates on this site and maybe cover some of the things that I’ve learnt such as unit testing Cocoa classes.
Movember
For the month of November this year I’m particpating in Movember. At the beginning of the month I started clean shaven and for the remainder of the month I’m growing and maintaining a moustache in order to raise awareness of men’s health issues. In particular depression and prostate cancer. This photo to the left shows my progress after the first two weeks (yeah its hard to see, the colour blends in 
).
- Depression affects 1 in 6 men. Most don’t seek help and untreated depression is a leading risk factor for suicide. Having seen the effect of depression first hand this year its certainly not something I would wish to see go untreated.
- Last year 18,700 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer in Australia and more than 2,900 died from it. This is equivalent to the number of women that die of breast cancer annually.
As part of participating in Movember I am seeking donations that will be passed on to the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia and beyondblue — the national depression initiative. The Movember Foundation is a registered charity, so all donations over $2 are tax deductible.
To sponsor my dodgy mo (as I’ve named it) follow this link: http://movember.wezm.net/.
Power Mac G5 on eBay
My trusty Power Mac G5 that was replaced by a Mac Pro earlier this year is now on eBay. If you’re in Australia and you or someone you know is looking for a cheap, capable, expandable workstation send them to the auction.
P.S. It pains me to have Flash on my site but its the easiest way to embed the auction. There’s no AU version of the “eBay To Go” feature I used either, which is why its in US dollars.
Typography Enhancements
Added a couple of WordPress plugins tonight to make the text on this blog a little prettier and hopefully more readable. First up is wp-hyphenate by KINGdesk to apply hyphenation rules. Second is wp-typogrify, which applies PHP SmartyPants (originally by John Gruber) to make “curly quotes” and proper dashes.
Update: I disabled wp-hyphenate as it was doing strange things to my html. In one case it was changing
<table class="top_headers"> into
<table
lass="top_headers">