Author Archives: Jens Ayton
P och NP nästan utan datorsvammel
1928 ställde matematikern David Hilbert sitt Entscheidungsproblem. Frågan var: finns det en algoritm – alltså en ändlig, fast uppställning deterministiska beräkningssteg – som, givet ett formellt språk och ett valfritt matematiskt påstående på det språket, kan avgöra om påståendet är … Continue reading
Imitating Greateness: 16-bit Hack ALU Design in Minecraft
In the autumn of 2010, a video of a sixteen-bit ALU in Minecraft by theinternetftw went viral. A month later, I’d bought the game, played around with circuits a bit and published a detailed description of a functionally identical (but … Continue reading
On the Mac App Store
When the Mac App Store was announced, I said to someone, “‘Convenient’ isn’t the same as ‘good for you’.” This might look slightly odd in a community dedicated to improving people’s workflows, so I’d like to expand on it. (I … Continue reading
Almost elegant cave man debugging
Recently, the Twitternets pointed me at Vincent Gable’s blog post, The Most Useful Objective-C Code I’ve Ever Written. It is indeed quite useful; given a semi-arbitrary expression, it prints out the value, using @encode() and macros to minimize drudgery.
Black Tuesday
█████ ███ ██████ ███ FRA ████ ███████ ██████. Continue reading
Proposal: generics (and some other stuff) for Objective-C
Some time ago, Greg Parker asked the Twitternets what we’d like to see in a purely hypothetical Objective-C-without-the-C language. Someone — I believe it was Landon Fuller — pointed at an article about the Strongtalk type system for Smalltalk. I … Continue reading
Multi-type Save Panel Controller
As a change of pace, I thought I’d post some code that doesn’t go out of its way to be bad. JAMultiTypeSavePanelController is a class (abstracted from ImageIO Export for Acorn) to handle the case where you want to offer … Continue reading
Wanted: a Right-Handed Keyboard
My current keyboard looks like this: (Well, roughly. It actually looks like this, but I couldn’t find a decent-resolution Swedish one.) This was a sensible design for the right-handed majority when it was introduced, some time in the stone age. … Continue reading
Net Neutrality (EU edition)
Network neutrality in Europe is under threat. Not in some vague possible future; right now. In one week, on Tuesday the fifth of May, the European Parliament will vote on the second reading of the Telecoms Package and amendments. I … Continue reading
Constant objects for fun and non-profit
The @"foo" operator for constant NSString objects in Objective-C is extremely convenient. Indeed, if it wasn’t there, programming with Cocoa would be a royal pain. Many of us have at various points wished there was equivalent syntax for NSNumbers, and … Continue reading