I’m going to start doing an installment here on videogame bosses I fondly remember getting my ass handed to me time over time.  I hope you enjoy!

If you’re familiar with this image then you’ve gotten relatively far in a pretty popular game, Final Fantasy X and had to battle this asshole, Seymour Flux.  I remembered this point as a very pivotal location in the game, as its where I just. couldn’t. beat. him. I could have gone back and grinded my characters up but this location is so late in the game, going backwards would take more time than possibly it could be worth.  I happened to come across this thread on reddit where other gamers expressed the same frustration, at the same location.  I shelved the game for well over a year before starting over from scratch, bulking up my characters, with the sole purpose of wiping the mountain side with his corpse.  When i did, it was glorious.

• Javascript Pattern Collection - This is a great collection of patterns and anti-patterns for use in JS.  I think its very easy to get lost in JS and before you know, its a huge mess.
• HTML5 Please - This is a GREAT and often updated site that tells you what HTML5 features are available, and how best to use them.
• Responsive Design Bookmarklet - This is a great bookmarklet that allows you to see any site in various sizes that you choose.  Even though im not the biggest fan of the huge responsive design CRAZE right now, its still something that is very important, and this is a great tool.
• 37Signals Phoenixes itself - 37Signals is rewriting all of its code. from scratch. GOOD LUCK with that.
• Creating iOS apps: Not that easy: Pretty great breakdown of the ins and outs of creating an iphone app from start to finish.

Im going to start doing a follow friday, and instead of just picking a random name and thats it, im going to explain why i like them. What a novel idea.

Follow himhere.

The first time I heard of el-p was back in late 97 on a show on WRAS atlanta, I believe they played Vital Nerve off of Company Flow‘s Funcrusher Plus. Back then it was extremely hard to find anything good (to me) in georgia, so that was a huge find for me. I went to the fat beats on mitchell street and copped Funcrusher plus on vinyl and played the shit out of it.

Anyways, fast forward to 99 when im in college, i ended up linking up with Cage and ran his website for a while and got a chance to meet el at the Revenge of the Robots tour. Was brief but really cool for me. I think he may have gotten a bit peeved when CAMU (RIP) let me on their bus to hear the nighthawks album before it released.

El has produced some of my favorite albums Funcrusher Plus, Cold Vein, and I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead. And countless songs as well.

El-P on twitter is one of the most open and communicative artists i’ve seen. He responds to his fans, jokes with them, lets them know whats going on with his albums/projects, but best of all, he’s not spammy. Artists tend to spam and ALL CAPS it a lot.

If theres any producer you should be following on twitter right now, its definitely El.

heres a track of his, along with a video.

Lab rat bravely escapes on hover craft only to crash directly outside of gates by PRODUCTOMART

For information on the event click here.

If you’re already going, you can view my connect information here.  I hope there’s some kind of meet-up after the event on Saturday, I’d love to network with some people!

See you there!

Here’s a quick summary on the repository pattern, explained by Martin Fowler:

A Repository mediates between the domain and data mapping layers, acting like an in-memory domain object collection. Client objects construct query specifications declaratively and submit them to Repository for satisfaction. Objects can be added to and removed from the Repository, as they can from a simple collection of objects, and the mapping code encapsulated by the Repository will carry out the appropriate operations behind the scenes. Conceptually, a Repository encapsulates the set of objects persisted in a data store and the operations performed over them, providing a more object-oriented view of the persistence layer. Repository also supports the objective of achieving a clean separation and one-way dependency between the domain and data mapping layers.

In a nutshell, all of the work for retrieving data from a data store is in one class.  This is the idea behind it and how it would apply to Core Data:

As you can see, the data store would be Core Data (SQLite, or even just a large PList).  The repository class in between would house all of the fetching, adding, removing, etc of that store.

I have created a project based off a default TableView project, and implemented this type of pattern into it. There should be a few things to note, which I will go over:

You will see a group called “CoreDataModels”, this is basically the models that Xcode automagically makes for you after you fill out your objects.  I decided to rename it to “_Event” to make it a superclass and pull all the public methods in a subclass.  This woud prevent Xcode from overwriting the files in the case I have to add/remove something from Core Data.  Here is an illustration of what I am talking about:

You’ll notice that I have the addEvent and removeEvent in the subclass, and at its most simple form the only thing this function does is call the repository’s add or remove event call.

I have gotten this kind of habit from my .NET work, in which I use LinqToSQL, where it creates object models just like Core Data does.  In those projects we did something similar mainly so that we can make changes to the database objects without having our custom code removed.

The second bit that I’ve done with this is created a RepositoryBase class that provides functions that are commonly used.  Basic functions such as closing of the data store, and fetches are contained in this so that you’re not constantly re-writing the same fetch code over and over.

Lastly, I’ve created a singleton function so that no matter where you are in the app you can always call the same instance of the repository, which removes the possibilities of having disconnected data.

Working with this pattern really helps organize your data access layer, at the expense of having a few extra files.  I believe the payoff though greatly outweighs the hit in file count.

And the source code for this project can be found here!

Next Steps:

I will be continuing to work on this, I plan on adding more functionality to make this a more robust and easy to use pattern.  Stay Tuned!

I’ll preface this with saying that I’m just as at fault as everyone else with this, so don’t think I’m on a soapbox; but we all seem to hang in cliques at all of these meetups.  We go with the people we know, and then, that’s it.  We don’t socialize.  We don’t REALLY go and meet-up with new people.  I’ve heard stories of people going to events that are supposed to be fun and social, but ended up hating the time they had, because no one was really being social, instead they were just with their friends, in a corner.  This isn’t the 8th grade dance people, let’s not be wallflowers!

When I hear tweetup, I picture people with the same interests meeting together at a place and talking.  Let’s say I go to one of these meetups that I saw someone I follow on twitter mention. It usually is very hard for me to get a solid conversation going, as most of the time, everyone is just hanging with the peeps (tweeps?) they already know.

So from now on I propose a few challenges for all you tweetup attendees:

• Gain/Meet a new person that you dont know.
• Join in a conversation with people you dont know.
• BE SOCIAL.

So whether it be the next refresh fort lauderdale, pizza tweetup, chevy pizza crawl, or whatever. Lets all try and embrace the social space, and actually be social.

I’m game. Are you?

To me, I have different uses for different social media channels. When I used facebook, I had all sorts of friends on there.  I had friends from elementary school that I rarely talked to (and only added them because they requested me), I had people from job interviews add me (no joke).  As my uses for each channel gets more specific, the fewer friends I have on it:

As you can see, facebook had the most amount of friends, which if you were my friend on there, you would know my activity stream was very very sparse and pretty non informative.  The only time I would post activity would be when someone else tagged me in a photo, or I was testing some sort of API call for an app.

Inside my facebook friends, I had a smaller number of followers on twitter.  I feel more comfortable being more active on twitter because there are more of my true {friends} on there.  People in my industry, or just friends I stay in more touch with.

Inside of my twitter, is finally my geo-location channel, foursquare.  As of right now, I have 43 friends on foursquare, a few of which I may delete and/or dont really use it.  To me, I’m revealing a very private part of my life, mainly where im at, at an exact moment in time.  Twitter does this to an extent with its new location services, but its not as exact.

The main point of this is that in my opinion, facebook is too broad of an outlet for me to feel comfortable posting where i’m at, during any given time.  And yes, I do know you can post to facebook from foursquare and gowalla, and even for that I never turned it on.

What do you think? Are you going to abandon your gowalla/yelp/foursquare ship for facebook locations?

What is it about?

The main thought is a liger is an awesome beast that is two things in one.  And to be a liger of development, you’re a mix of more than one language.  Be it .Net and PHP, or Objective C and AS3, being a liger can be very stressful to do, and to be efficient at one takes a lot.

In my panel I will talk about what i believe is required to be efficient in this role, as well as what to look out for once you take this title on.

I plan on bringing some SWAG to this so im excited about creating that as well!

Vote for me here if you’d like to hear more about it!

I knew what i HAD to do, but I wasnt very sure on how to do it.  I knew i had to use the Instruments app that comes with XCode.  I’m still a rather new iphone developer, and have used the leak instrument a bit, but after using that, i still couldn’t figure out the leak.  So I did what any other programmer does. Stack Overflow.

<tangent>
If you’re a developer and dont know what stack overflow is, you should probably just start a new career now.
</tangent>

Luckily a SO post led me to googling about the “Object Allocations” instrument thats included, and found this wonderful post that led me in the right direction. @markjnet‘s post on zombie use detection was spot on and helped me find my bug within an hour of using the instrument.

Heres the official documentation for the instruments app.

Another helpful post ive read about instruments can be found on The Apple Blog.

Bottom line is, if you want to really optimize your time spent on bug hunting, knowing the Instruments app is crucial!