Apple products are the next big wave in computing. I learned to program the Macintosh in the latter half of the 1980’s, just before I learned to program MS-Windows and C++.

By the mid-1990’s, Apple needed to refuel its Macintosh computer line with a new operating system. Ultimately, that led the company to rehire one of its original cofounders, Steve Jobs. When Apple did this, they also gained a wealth of new technologies that his NeXT company had adopted in the mid-1990’s and fostered right up until he rejoined Apple at its helm.

Today, thanks to this merger, Apple has a very powerful framework for application programming, developing services, and writing plugins called Cocoa .

This framework is used by programmers to write software for all of these popular, modern platforms.

• Macintosh
• iPhone
• iPod Touch
• iSlate ?

The Cocoa framework uses many classic OOP design patterns, especially the most powerful one for GUI programming: Model-View-Controller (MVC).

Cocoa has an optional layer on top of its regular MVC classes called CoreData. CoreData basically adds persistence capabilities to MVC objects. This relieves the programmer of many of the low-level programming burdens of saving/restoring objects in the model to persistence storage (SQLite, XML, etc.).

The primary programming language for Mac programming is named Objective-C . It was created in the mid-1980’s, at approximately the same time as C++ .

The GCC compiler is used to compile Objective-C programs on the Macintosh platform. Apple has harnessed the power of the DBX debugger and DTrace to debug & diagnose programs on the Mac. These tools are written for Unix, which the Mac is fortunate to have as the lower-level of its operating system.

The IDE used on Macs to create applications for it and other Apple products is named Xcode .

This book touches upon all of these subjects. If you know a little bit about them already, it will greatly strengthen your understanding of how they work on in Apple’s programming and runtime platforms. That is exactly what I want to do.

A friend of mine told me about Erlang years ago and said he really liked it.

The same friend recommended Prolog, which Erlang programs somewhat resemble. I am very glad I learned Prolog. I can solve some problems much faster in Prolog than in conventional approaches using Java and SQL, for example.

Erlang is good for fault-tolerant computing and communications. It has very powerful distributed processing capabilities. It has direct support for BER data conversions – which is used in some protocols.

The fact that this book is published by The Practical Programmers told me two things:

1. Erlang has finally gotten noticed by the larger programming community.
2. At last a book that is extremely readable on the subject.

Lots of bloated programming project costs are due to the fact that programmers working on it only know a couple of languages.

There are things called special-purpose languages that are well-suited to solving problems in particular domains.

Learning and eventually judiciously using more than just a couple languages is good risk management and cost-control.

Trying to learn and use a new language at the same time for a commercial project is generally not a good idea from what I have seen. Grabbing a book like this one and studying it at home is a better approach for self-development and professional success.

Lots of things like test data generators, file syntax checkers, database integrity checkers, test clients for server applications – and so forth, can be vastly simplified by using the right language for the job. For these things, I quite often find that the right language is not the same programming language the deliverable is be written in.

So even if I never write a shipping application program in Erlang, I anticipate someday I can benefit greatly from reading this book.

I want to create some characters of races that were introduced in the Burning Crusade expansion set.

I am interested in making sure that I pick the best professions for them, so that they get off to a good start.

Having created a few characters with pretty poor choices as their pair of professions, I came to see the value of doing this particular thing right.

It seems like the significance of professions chosen in the game with respect to game play falls right in between that of class and race.

So this book seems like it will be a good one for making sure the new characters get started on the “right track”.

This is a reference manual as far as most of the pages in the book go. There is a little bit of story background too.

I wanted to learn a little bit more about the game, World of WarCraft. I also wanted a way to look up information quickly that I had already seen in game – but had not written down.

What I did not want to do is use the book to “read ahead” and learn what to do and where to do it as I venture into each new place in the game.

At that point, playing the game would consist solely of pushing buttons and no thinking – quick or deliberate – at all. For me, then it would be pointless and I wouldn’t be sharpening any skills at all, except research.

Different people can use it different ways.

The material in the book is organized so that it can be helpful to people with many different levels of experiences in the game. Also, the organization is one in such a way that it is pretty easy to learn what you want – and not learn what you do not want.

I have played the game a bit. By no means an expert but I think I am not a beginner anymore.

Most of my experience is with the original version of WoW. I only upgraded to the Burning Cruside expansion set recently. I have barely peeked inside the beginner areas of a couple major new lands it introduces. So the fact this DVD just covers the original version of WoW was just fine with me.

I wanted to try the game itself out of technical curiosity. Recently, having played it some, I wanted to see what the actual creators of the game had to say about building it.

I consider myself more of a developer than a game player. Even when playing it I find myself thinking about OpenGL, modeling, simulations, object oriented programming.

But on the flip side of the looking glass, I used to read mythology and legends a fair bit in grade school. Myths and folklore are interesting subjects to me – both the stories and the implications behind them.

The promise of cinematic clips also sounded pretty good. I wanted to learn more about the lore of the game – the “backstory”, in Hollywood terms.

The promise of seeing how the creator’s themselves see the game also proved enticing. I was curious how they approached the problem of undertaking something so huge and technically complex.

I am not sure that is what the DVD has to offer. But that is what I wanted out of it.

I found that if you make coffee that is just a little extra strong and a little extra hot, then add about a quarter of its volume’s worth of milk – it tastes the same as a latte.

So, while they taste very good compared to regular milk, lattes are shamelessly over-priced and over-hyped.

The second one had length scenes in the underground city that were just, well, boring – but not so this one.

The action/suspense kept moving along in this film.

The only thing that seems silly about this whole series is that the story writer put forth a ridiculous premise. He put forth the idea that human beings contain a lot of electrical energy – when the fact is, they do not.

The voltage levels of the human brain and nervous system can barely be measured.

The idea that a machine population would farm humans for electricity is preposterous.

The machines would have quickly used up all the energy just keeping the human beings alive, and gotten back little in return. Plus, taking all the energy (what little there was) from the human hosts – would have killed everyone immediately.

The Matrix is about impossible combat. And the fight scenes in this movie delivered that once again.

It is the only kind of sugar I like in coffee. Usually, I have it black – sometimes with milk and sugar.

Initially, I did not even see it in this country. Only in England.

Then, I started seeing packets of it in the trendier coffee shops.

I looked for it in the supermarket for years but could not find it. Finally, it showed up this year at one of the grocery stores near where I live, so I bought it.

The reason I like this sugar in coffee is that it has a tamer and more interesting taste than most sugar. The crystals are light brown and larger than regular sugar. It tastes like a cross between brown sugar and regular crystaline white sugar.

It is made with Turbinado sugar from Hawaii, in case you are interested.

Try it in coffee sometime, if you have not already done so. I think you will prefer it of regular sugar for your coffee.

I eat very little pork. It does not have the greatest reputation as a healthy food.

However, in this meal you are getting a pretty healthy mix of foods.

Total calories on the entire dish is 240 calories. That is about the same number you will find in a 20 ounce soft drink bottle.

What you will not find in the soft drink bottle is almost forty percent of your protein requirement for the day, some vitamin A, calcium, and some iron. You might find some vitamin C in your soda if it is an orange one.

This also has 16% of your daily requirement of dietary fiber. That is another thing you are not going to find in your soda – or virtually any other drink, for that matter.

It has 15 grams of fat total (10% of daily requirement) – zero grams of which are trans fat.

It is pretty tasty.

It is still pork, though. So heed the warnings on the box – keep it frozen until ready to eat, and then cook it thoroughly according to the recommendations. Undercooked pork is dangerous.

In these days of electric freezers and microwave ovens, you can have a hot pork dinner in minutes. The number of calories and the amount of fat in this dish is not as high as you would expect, and is a great alternative to junk foods.

The taste of the ice cream is good, and the product would have been just fine – if they left it at that.

Apparently, somebody decided to carry the homage to its namesake just a little too far, however.

When you eat the ice cream, bits of some weird stuff they embedded in the product get stuck in your teeth.

You chew them but they do not dissolve. What the heck is this stuff???

Please tell me that someone at Breyers did not decide to embed bubble gum in food.

You know, food – that stuff you are supposed to swallow? You know, bubble gum – that stuff you are not supposed to swallow.

At first, I thought the little pink and blue chunks of some unindentifiable substance were some kind of candy. And I was swallowing some.

Then, it started to form bum-like little balls between my teeth – like bubble gum, sort of. And I chewed them, and they did not go away.

Here is the Breyers Bubble Yum ice cream home page. I do not see bubble gum or Bubble Yum listed as an ingredient, thank god.

I still think this is a dumb product, and I doubt I will ever buy it or eat it again.

They should have left out the weird gum-like stuff and simply made an ice cream. My advice is stay away from this.

Even a kid that begs for it at home is probably not going to be too taken with it once he gets it in a bowl.