Where's the data on how little sleep I can get away with?

I don't know if it's a fact that software developers as a group operate sleep deprived for long periods of time before catching up, but anecdotally I know it to be true. It's certainly something I struggle with on a daily basis.

Yesterday when I saw this NY Times article titled "How little sleep can you get away with?" I thought it was great, made me think I maybe should change my ways:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/magazine/mag-17Sleep-t.html

I re-read it this morning because I wanted to know where the sleep deprivation to productivity inflection point was. How long can I go with sleep deprivation before the increased amount of awake but impaired time becomes counter productive? Frustratingly it's not in the article. This is the kind of bad reporting I can't stand anymore. I don't want paragraphs of "story", I want a short description and then tables of data. This is the kind of thing Mythbusters would easily and clearly have nailed in a simple table.

How much sleep to get is particularly tough because with kids, wake up time is totally out of your hands. I wrote SleepMute for Mac (available on the Mac App Store) mostly to guarantee uninterrupted sleep from my always on Mac's sound alerts when I do hit the sack.
http://www.tangerineelement.com/main/sleepmute.html

Ironic I developed the app to help with uninterrupted sleep using a lot of sleep deprivation.

Monday Morning Inspiration

Wil Shipley with some good inspirational words for my Monday morning...

"The secret of success turns out to be so incredibly simple: Work your ass off. Really care about what you're creating, not the fame or fortune you'll get. You'll succeed."

From Success, and Farming vs. Mining

Stopping iWeb From Turning Text Links Into Images

Back in September 2010, Rage Software's blog published the provocatively titled post Are You Making The Biggest Search Engine Blunder with iWeb? Well it was provocative to me since I'd been publishing the Tangerine Element web site using iWeb since July 2008 when iTimeZone came out on the App Store. I immediately consumed the article. If you haven't read it, please do so you're up to speed. As soon as I had a chance, I enabled Show text imaging indicator in iWeb. I was horrified, the main navigation for Tangerine Element, as well as other bits of seemingly innocent text, was being converted to images. I burned numerous hours trying to tweak the right combination of settings to solve this problem without success. Eventually I gave up, but I finally cracked it tonight! Here's what to do.

There is a very nice inspector in iWeb that allows you to set properties on hyperlinks. Your hyperlinks are going to be text in text boxes, and this is where you can make all your links into images. If you click your text box and set the hyperlink properties, iWeb will immediately change your text into an image on publish. To get a text hyperlink, you have to double-click so that just the text is selected, not the box, then set the hyperlink properties. This also allows you to set the Format tab properties for rollovers.

Recommendation: Use FaceTime on Mac OS X for Video Chat Instead of iChat

I've been using iChat to video chat with my family for at least 6 years. With each Mac OS X release, Apple's made nice improvements to the video calls in iChat. This app is what sealed the deal for getting my parents off Windows years ago, and more recently prompted me to upgrade my mother-in-laws iMac to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. It's been one of my favorite Mac-only apps. Of course Skype has been an option too in recent years and I've used it plenty especially to people on Windows. In my experience though, iChat's video quality has always been better. But it is time to say goodbye to iChat for video calls and use FaceTime, it's just better for most people.

Yes FaceTime costs a couple bucks, but video quality is definitely improved because FaceTime uses a widescreen aspect ratio to send & receive video. This has always been on my iChat wish list since iChat 5.0.3 on Snow Leopard captures video using a VGA (640x480) aspect ratio (i.e. 4:3) and then stretches it for widescreen viewing. FaceTime for Mac has the ability to send & receive video calls in 720p HD, but only the new early 2011 MacBook Pros have a built-in FaceTime cameras capable of sending 720p HD, as does the iPhone 4. Older Macs with iSight camera's top out at VGA resolution, but the widescreen aspect ratio only in FaceTime helps.

The other big reason to switch the family over to FaceTime is so they can receive FaceTime calls from iPhone 4, iPod touch, or iPad 2. This came in very handy today since I had taken the time to get my parents to buy FaceTime on their iMac a few days ago. This allowed me to FaceTime to my parents from the hospital room of my wife's father. It sounds like a commercial, but it happened & was great. Thanks Pocono Medial Center for the open WiFi.

About the only gripe I have for FaceTime is that when calling Mac to Mac, the app starts the video call in portrait orientation instead of landscape. A widescreen device that can't have it's orientation changed should of course start in landscape.

Be cautious about using Xcode 4.0 with LLVM 2.0 to deploy apps to iPhone 3G & below devices, apps crash

Update
Looks like this was resolved in Xcode 4.0.2 since I can't reproduce it anymore.

Original
On two separate iOS apps compiled with LLVM 2.0, user's whose iOS device could only run arm6 binaries crash at launch. Recompiling with LLVM 1.7 in Xcode 3.2.6 produces a fat binary that works for both armv6 & armv7 based devices.

It's certainly possible that there is some build setting I tweaked to expose a bug in LLVM 2.0. If that is true, I haven't found which one yet.

I filed a bug with Apple on this of course, # 9141747. If you are seeing the same issue, please dupe my bug.

Here are some build settings that might be relevant:

Setting	Selection
Architectures	Standard (armv6 armv7)
Build Active Architectures Only	No
C/C++ Compiler Version	LLVM 2.0 or LLVM 1.7
iOS Deployment Target	iOS 4.0 or iOS 3.1.3
C Language Dialect	C99 [-std=c99]

Nick Cage will apparently do anything for a buck

Even funnier, the American Library Association thought this would inspire someone else to read.

Batman (1989)'s Alfred Has Departed

Sad to hear the actor responsible for one of my favorite Alfred performances has left the building.

Ain't it Cool News: Hammer & Tim Burton fave, Michael Gough passes on...

Greed Is Good in NFL Labor Talks

Greed Is Good in NFL Labor Talks

Great piece by Bill Simmons on the NFL labor dispute.

via Daring Fireball  ★ 

Flash Player 10.2 vs. iTunes 10.1.2 CPU Utilization Playing a Song

Flash Player 10.2 was released today. The big claimed improvement is better, i.e. lower, CPU utilization playing H.264 encoded HD video. This tweet claims a big drop in CPU usage for Pandora.com's Flash app.

Curious, I installed Flash Player 10.2 on my main iMac even with the rare Safari pseudo-hang I had on the work laptop after installing Flash Player 10.2

Here's the audio playback performance I see in Mac OS X 10.6.6:

• Pandora.com playing a song with Flash Player 10.2 uses ~ 10% of CPU
• iTunes 10.1.2 playing a 256 kbps AAC file ~ 5% of CPU
• Pandora.com's Flash app paused, ~ 6.6% CPU

Yeah, Flash is totally not going to use more CPU cycles than native Mac OS X audio/video playback Real Soon Now™

How To Compare NSDecimalNumbers in Objective-C

I was working on some code today where I had to compare two NSDecimalNumbers. This was my first attempt at comparing them:

NSDecimalNumber *number1 = [NSDecimalNumber one];
NSDecimalNumber *zero = [NSDecimalNumber zero];

if (number1 > zero) {
	//1 is always greater than 0 right?
}

This code will compile without errors or even warnings, but it doesn't work. It works, but it doesn't do what you expect. Turns out you aren't comparing the values of the two NSDecimalNumbers, your comparing pointer addresses.

Even more shocking, Objective-C does not have operator overloading! I've been developing in Objective-C for 3+ years now and I had no idea, it just never came up in iTimeZone. Assuming that Objective-C had operator overloads that did the expected evaluation on the value cost me about 4 hours today, especially since the compiler was no help.

I switched over to this implementation and thought I was done:

NSDecimalNumber *number1 = [NSDecimalNumber one];
NSDecimalNumber *zero = [NSDecimalNumber zero];

if ([number1 floatValue] > [zero floatValue]) {
	//1 is always greater than 0 right?
}

Looks good right? Wrong! While this works for short fractional numbers, numbers that have more precisions will lose them with that syntax. I could have also used:

...
if ([number1 doubleValue] > [zero doubleValue]) {
	//1 is always greater than 0 right?
}

That increases the precision from 6 digits to 15, quite a leap, but some digits could still get cutoff.

The absolutely correct way?

...
if ([number1 compare:zero] ==  NSOrderedDescending) {
	//Hey number1 is greater after all
}

I don't think I am going out on a limb here saying that isn't the easiest to understand syntax. A comment surely would have to go above the if statement to rewrite that in plain english, or even using an operator. While I have only written a few operator overload methods in C++ and none in .NET, I sure did use them in .NET all the time. I hope Objectice-C gets them in a future release.