I'm a company

I finally got around to filing my LLC with the state yesterday.  Turns out it only took about 15 minutes and $50.  Easy.  

"Brian's Brain" is off and running!

Running Windows on my Mac (gasp!)

Well, I've finally been forced to figure out how to run Windows on my Mac.  The culprit?  Quicken.  

I love Quicken.  But they just don't support the Mac.  Intuit is in Beta on "Quicken Financial Life" for the Mac, but it is currently scheduled for release this summer, and that is at least a 6-month delay from the original announced date.

So, for the last year or so, I've been running Quicken on my wife's Vista laptop.  But it is SERIOUSLY slow!

I finally decided to try VMWare Fusion, but I couldn't find my original Windows Me install CD (no surpise there), and my old Windows XP Home Upgrade CD wouldn't install without it.  So I got the Windows 7 beta, and installed it.

The Windows 7 beta installed fine on Fusion, but it was also SERIOUSLY slow.  And it crashed.  So that sucked.

But then I remembered a stack of old CDs I had laying around with the intent of eventually using them in a yard project, and managed to find some old Windows 98 betas.  And the XP home upgrade installer recognized one of them!  Stay tuned...

Well, it turned out to install flawlessly.  And I have Quicken installed and working.  It was kinda slow, so I upgraded my Mac to 4GB and gave 1GB to VMWare.  We'll see if that helps.

Buttons & Books

I have spent the last couple of days adding some buttons to my app. I don't know if I'm back up to speed, or if the books I bought are really helping, or it's the Buffy "Once More, With Feeling" soundtrack I've been listening to, or what, but it has gone pretty smoothly!

About the books, here's what I picked up at Powell's:

• iPhone SDK Application Development
• The iPhone Developer's Cookbook
• iPhone Open Application Development
• iPhone Forensics

So far the first two have come in handy.  Hoping the last two help when I need to see "under the hood".

Mobile Tagging

Attending a presentation on mobile tagging. The simplest example is a 2D barcode that encodes a URL, printed as part of an advertisement. Load mobile app, shoot barcode with camera, and URL is loaded in your browser.

Google is extending AdSense and YouTube to support QR Code generation. MS has proprietary tag format.

Can be read from print, screen even plaque.

Privacy issues. Is URL malicious? Perhaps creator of reader (eg google) could provide clearinghouse that qualified URL before redirecting to it.

Debug Logging

Today I'm taking some time to enhance my debug logging.  I now have so many debug log messages that I need a way to enable/disable them quickly at compile time.

I have it mostly done, so now's the time when I usually find out that this capability is already provided for me somehow...  ;-)

XCode & Subversion

I'm back to full-time iPhone development, and I am determined to solve a problem I've been having with Subversion. Our project repo is up on projectlocker.com. I can access it fine via every mechanism (XCode Repository browser, Safari, svn command-line) EXCEPT from within the "Groups & Files" window. It always fails as follows:

Error: 170001 (Authorization failed) Description: PROPFIND request failed on ...
Error: 170001 (Authorization failed) Description: PROPFIND of ... : authorization failed (https://seed1.projectlocker.com)

Oh, this works fine for my partner.

Google has been no help. Nor have the ProjectLocker nor Apple Developer web-sites.

So, I created a new dummy repo, uploaded some dummy code, and ... it works.

Hmm. So it is something with the files in my project repo. Is some path hardcoded maybe? I did demote the code under a "trunk" path at some point..

Oh, I can't believe it.  In Project Info - General, there is an "SCM Repository" field.  It was set to my local file:// repository for some reason.  Probably because that's where I had done my original development.  Not sure why it didn't default to the repo from which it was checked out - Doh!

Anyway, it works now.  Yea!

iPhone Tips

Check out these iPhone tips.  My tip: learn all 10 of them.