Instantly you could see it was an almost perfect copy of the Apple Store. It was only missing one thing. Customers.

The other odd thing was that my son (16 yrs old), kept referring to it as the Dell store. Partly because this is Dell country (Round rock is about 10 minutes away), he associates the Microsoft four color square as a brand of Dell rather than Microsoft. At his age his exposure to Microsoft products is primarily the crappy school computers, bought for price rather than quality.

No one he knows has a Microsoft phone or Zune. I realized I have seen a lot of this softness in the Microsoft brand around him and his friends. I think some of them think the Windows logo on the Dells just means that it has windows on the screen, not Windows the software.

When Windows came out it was revolutionary. Now every computer has windows and a mouse, so the brand has really come to mean nothing.

As usual the grumbling about how tickets were sold have started to spread. Everyone has there own idea of the best way to sell 5,000 tickets to 150,000 people. The suggestions seem to coincidentally benefit the poster of the idea.

There is no fair, reasonable way to divide 5000 tickets over 150,000+ people who might want to attend.

But Apple has done four great things this year to make WWDC more beneficial for all.

First, they held the Tech Talks which can end up being a less expensive for attendees. My only wish on how to improve these is to make them a more rolling and regularly updated road show. I attended the one in Austin, and the information would have been better if it had been updated for the “new” iPad. Instead it seemed like they had locked things in to where they were in the first TechTalk three months earlier.

Second, Apple made clear a no-resale policy on tickets. This will help put and end to scalpers.

Third, they made clear that videos will be available shortly after the event. This is the first time that Apple has committed to having videos available at a reasonable time. In past years the videos have sometimes taken months. Last year they released them all for free, and did so the week after WWDC. By now committing to this schedule, it keeps non attendees as up to date as those who are in the lucky 5,000.

Fourth, the made a clear policy on underage developers. This doesn’t affect me at all, but it does show that Apple has been listening and made a point to deal with this issue.

Instead of wailing and gnashing of teeth that you didn’t get a WWDC ticket, take this moment to thank Apple for that which they are doing right, and suggest what can be done to create an even better development environment.

The current trunk is in production use so the trunk is seldom broken. This update now requires ARC. Previous builds are available in https://svn.karlkraft.com/mysql_connector/versions

They claim ownership, copyright and the right to license my source code as they see fit.

For a group so focused on open source, you think they would know better.Recently, famous toe cheese eater and lead zealot of the FSF, Richard Stallman, made what some might consider comments of poor taste regarding the death of Steve Jobs.

I must admit once upon a time I shared the ideals of the FSF, but lately, not so much..

About NFMake

From the moment I laid eyes on a NeXT computer, I knew it was different. Anyone lucky enough to use a NeXT computer, or later NeXTStep or OpenStep probably felt the same way.

Those who declare themselves proponents of free software did what they most often do when confronted with something magnificent; They set about to copy without any innovation. They created a project called GNUStep designed to mimic OpenStep. They couldn’t even come up with an original name.

I confess to falling prey to this siren song. I had spent a decade programming in Objective-C and I wasn’t really quite sure if anything I wrote would be any more relevant than software I had written in AppleSoft, UCSD Pascal, or Turbo Pascal.

So I laid a plan to ensure I could take my Objective-C programs and compile them on a GNUStep target. Loathing makefiles, I created NFMake, a tool that would read the NeXT formatted Project Builder file format and build the same project on GNUStep.

The original source as I first released it
is available for you to peruse.

You will notice that nowhere in my original tarball do the initials GNU, FSF or GPL appear.

I last used NFMake when I was building software for the Palm platform. Eventually I abandoned it as GNUStep stalled, Palm died, an Apple released OSX and incredible tools like Xcode.

Copyright Who ?!?

If you do a Google search for NFMake, you can find it hosted on “gna”, the gnu project repository.

The difference is that almost every source file has had a header tacked on that starts with:


/*
Copyright (C) 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.

NFMake was not a work for hire (at least not hired by FSF), and the copyright was never assigned to them or anyone else.

Equally interesting is that the source is listed as LGPLv2, but at some point someone decided they could relicense it GPLv3, a license that I despise.

Whatever the reason, it should have never been done.

If you have ever released your source, you may want to take this moment to make sure the FSF isn’t claiming ownership of your work as well.

The famous Apple commercial, but narrated by Steve Jobs instead of by Richard Dreyfus.

Most updates will require no changes. Things will just work better.

MysqlConnection supports an idle loop that sends a periodic request to the MySQL server to keep the connection alive. However this wasn’t protected in multi threaded programs and could crash.

MysqlFetch was creating the name of the field on each row iteration. On large selects this resulted in a large amount of duplicated memory being allocated.

MysqlFetch now supports the DECIMAL type.

MysqlFetch now deals with negative LONG and LONGLONG values. Corrected the size of these types on 64 bit compiles to match the MySQL definition. Also fixed the use of TINY, FLOAT and DOUBLE. Thanks to Bill Allen for contributing this code.

Added support for connecting to multiple servers in a failover pattern. Connection are now created with a MysqlServer instance or array of the same. This will require a code change, and you will need to add MysqlServer to your project.

Fixed some debug messages. Two of them had bad formatting, and one was still using NSLog.

Added a method to check status of autocommit.

Add ability to ignore mysql error when a record is inserted that matches a previously inserted records unique value for 1 or more columns. I have to admit that I ended up not using this code, so it is of dubious value.

The length of data passed to mysql_stmt_prepare needs to be expressed in byte length, not character length. Thanks to Coupez Julien for pointing this out.

In December of 1987 I went on a school trip to Washington DC. As part of that trip we visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. While there we learned all sorts of facts about the angle of reflection, how the memorial came to be, and dozens of other things that are now only a dim recollection.

What I do remember is that as our bus of high school students disembarked, the group I was with came upon a man who reeked of booze, and had on his back the clothes he probably lived in every day. Everyone in the group walked around him and avoided any interaction. But something about him seemed irregular for an average homeless man. I also really had no interest in the memorial. It is a list of 50,000+ people that I have never met.

He looked like he was looking for something, and muttering under his breath about “finding”. I must admit that my thought was that he had lost his shopping cart of belongings. Deciding that interacting with this homeless drunk was going to be a more worthy use of my time than looking at granite, I asked him what he was looking for in the hopes that I could help him find it.

He said he was looking for his friend. So I looked around for a similarly dressed drunk homeless man in the hopes that I could point him on the way. Seeing none nearby, I asked where he had last seen his friend in the hopes that I could point him in the right direction. I can’t recall the words, but with the words he spoke it was made clear that the last time he had seen his friend was in Vietnam.

The I understood. He wasn’t looking for a person. He was looking for a name.

Trying to find a name by reading them one at a time is difficult, although I did try for a minute. I then recalled that a few minutes earlier when listening to facts about the wall, that we were told about a stand on one end that had a alphabetical list of names since the names on the wall are in order of death.

It took a bit of convincing to get my new companion to go to the book, since he knew the name was somewhere on the wall, but at least now I understood what he was trying to find. The index on the pedestal was in the form of a phone book. Unlike the wall it lists the service, the rank, and a few other details also lost to memory.

The details he had were few, he had only a common last name, his rank, and the year he died.

The year was off by one. His friend received a posthumous promotion.

We walked down to the eastern panel listed in the index, and found the name. He broke down in tears, and I went to a nearby kiosk that sold kits for making name impressions. I helped him make an impression of the name, and left him there.

One of my pet peeves is the confusion of Memorial Day and Veterans Day, but I can never forget.

Memorial Day is for the war dead, the names on the wall.

Veterans Day is for those still alive with memories of the dead.

The first star was because it was an Android tablet, and there aren’t many of those.

The second star is because it isn’t an iPad.

The third star is because it runs pseudo flash. Everyone keep talking about flash support for mobile devices, but when you get down to the nitty and the gritty, it always seems to mostly be there, and usually just for playing videos off YouTube. As shown in the review, BBC flash doesn’t work.

As for all the negatives mentioned, they don’t detract from the score at all.

Keeping up appearances – feels adequately sturdy and tough

Screen – However, the 7-inch display we have here is just a fairly standard TFT LCD. It’s bright and colourful enough

Connectivity –  not available in non-3G guise

Storage –  512MB of RAM …. de facto amount for these kind of portable devices

Performance and Battery Life –  not slick at all …. Scrolling down your average website is quite juddery …. Pinch-to-zoom is also a laggy affair

Accelerometer –  we found it constantly tilting the screen in ways we didn’t want it to …. increasingly frustrating experience

Multitasking –  did not suffer too much in this department

Maps –  obvious lag, which is disappointing

Battery Life –  We charged it to full capacity, and it was begging for more juice after about four hours of sporadic testing …. device gets extremely hot after watching videos or browsing the web for an hour …. doesn’t do a good enough job of harnessing its power in an efficient manor

Software not optimised? –  Google itself admits that the OS is not optimised for tablets yet …. Froyo is not optimised for use on tablets …. it’s just not a finished piece of software in terms of tablet optimisation …. graphics and text within them can look a bit blurry

Screen (Performance) –  the absence of an AMOLED display is a bit of a let-down, particularly at this premium price

Indoors –  Cartoons and Pixar-style 3D animations look best, while the screen does a less good job at handling darker colours

Outdoors – massive pain …. literally impossible to see anything on it at all …. screen makes life pretty difficult

Responsiveness –  not a fun device to use

Usability (Keyboard) –  keyboard is not exactly what you’d call ‘comfortable’ to use. Typing quickly is not easy at all

Flash support –  no noticeable performance issues here, it just works

Multi-tasking –  Android 2.2 supports multitasking, and thus so does the Samsung Galaxy Tab

Copy and paste –  Copy and paste features are included

Email and extras –  We heart Android here at TechRadar

Camera –  To say the Samsung Galaxy Tab’s camera is mediocre would be to put it bluntly …. quite awkward to take snaps with …. hard to get a proper grip on the device and to then hold it still …. Images lack detail in all areas …. most photographs looking quite washed out …. Colours look faded rather than vivid …. The camera struggled to deal with both bright and dark conditions

Video Recording – There’s no HD recording …. results were still mostly disappointing …. handling of motion isn’t too bad …. quality isn’t great …. Colours are washed out …. contrast is quite poor …. Galaxy Tab’s video quality is not great

Media –  it’s limited to which codecs and support Google has added to the OS …. some of our files worked while others didn’t

Youtube –  browsers will always try to take you away from the 720p versions of videos even if you use the direct URL

BBC Video – some browsers, we were told that our ‘phone’ does not support iPlayer yet …. main browser …. it’s a bit tricky to get videos playing well …. It’s a fiddly experience

Verdict –  massive identity problem …. most bipolar gadget we’ve ever tested …. Is it a phone? No …. Is it a tablet? Again, no …. sluggish web browsing is very frustrating …. screen is also quite disappointing …. camera, too, is fairly poor …. you expect all the features to be top-notch… But they’re not …. If portability and Android are your main concern, the Galaxy Tab is certainly a handy gadget to have in your geeky arsenal

Download Objc_Mysql_iPhone_OSX_1.0.zip (7.3 MB), while you read the rest.

Support for iOS

I had been hoping that with the announcement of new devices and versions of iOS, that Apple might add garbage collection to the iOS platform, but this appears to not be happening.  So the time was right to bite the bullet and clean this up so it worked on iOS.

Before you jump with both feet into using MySQL on iOS, let me point out a few reasons you may not want to use this as a solution.

If you are planning on submitting an application with this library to the AppStore, there is no guarantee that it will be accepted by Apple.  While I use this library on a daily basis for my code, I don’t have any plans to submit anything to the Apple Store using this library, for the reasons I will outline shortly.  So an AppStore submission that uses this library will be on the bleeding edge.

While MySQL is popular, it is not designed to be a forward facing internet accessible application.  All of my MySQL deployments are hidden behind firewalls with limited access.    If you use this to allow people to access a public MySQL database, you are asking for trouble, both in terms of load handling and security.  Keep in mind that AppStore apps are not encrypted, only signed.  So extracting the username, password and host from your binary is a trivial exercise.

You may find this useful however for in house iOS applications, which is where I am using it.

Features, functionality and bug fixes

In adition to the major new feature of iOS support, this version has several bug fixes, plus some added functionality.

This version features 6 architectures in a single static library.  The architectures are  armv6 and armv7 for iOS, and ppc, ppc64, i386, and x86_64 for desktop OSX.  While this increases the download size, only the architectures matching your target will be included in your final product.  So if you are building for iPhone 4 only, then only armv7 will be included.  If you are building for Snow Leopard on 64 bit, then only x86_64 will be included.

The iPhone versions should work on 3.0 all the way up to 4.1.

Since the iPhone does not have garbage collection, I had to #ifdef some code to get it working correctly there.  While it has not been tested extensively, the most common cases have been tested with Instruments, and there are no leaks.

Since the most common case for non garbage collected environments is the iPhone, the default size for blobs is is 10K on those platforms and 1M in garbage collected environments.  Blobs under those sizes are grabbed in a single pass, blobs larger than that take a second pass, which is slower, but transparently done after the initial fetch.  Of course, since source is included, you can change that if you have special needs.

MysqlFetchField will now identify which fields are part of the primary key.

Even though the classes were garbage collected, the underlying MySQL ANSI-C connector was not, and there were some bugs related to memory allocation that have been cleaned up.

MysqlConnection now supports strict mode.  In strict mode, if you insert data that is too long for a field it will throw an exception instead of being silently truncated.

While this code is in day to day use in dozens of projects, it by no means is bug free.  Caveat emptor.  In particular, since iOS does not support NSCalendarDate I needed to move to NSDateComponents.  As a result, when invalid dates like ’0000-00-00 00:00:00′ are fetched, they will be munged into something else. (although it appears consistent)

As I went down the lines counting, I could not believe the amount of stress that I induced in those being counted.  People quickly began to worry about whether they were too far back in line to get a phone, or even if they were in the right line.  I was stopped about every 25 people asking what their number in line was. I had to explain over and over that I wasn’t counting for any purpose.

For the record, by the time 7 AM rolled around there were 700 total people in the two lines.  During that time I’m sure the line grew, because I started with the no-reservation line first, and then proceeded to the reserved line, which wound around the building in a different direction.  Between 7AM and 7:20, another 82 people showed up in the reserved line behind me.