So here it is this year I was Optimus Prime, sorry for the quality of my photo auto focus was left off, hopefully someone gets me a crisper copy. I’ve also included meg’s very nice Samurai PIzza Cats costume:

Optimus Prime Costume

Who you gonna call when you need some pepperoni!

Total time for the costumes was about 6 days, trophies were won.

So I do a lot of java development, but for my project work I am looking to do a whole whack of C and possibly Objective-C. So this means xCode and I must become friends. My problem with this is I really like the eclipse text shortcuts for deleting / moving / duplicating lines. Also I am just used to control + space for my auto complete, and option + shift + r for refactoring.

Having encountered this problem before in TextMate doing ruby stuff I assumed there would be a handy macro solution, this was not the case. So after some serious web searching I found several articles on how to solve a few of these problems. Some suggested I use ruby, other showed some neat hacking tricks with some keyboard plists, at any rate I won’t go into the how, you can find those (here, and here ).

I am simply providing my key bindings file for anyone who cares to use it.

What it does:

• move line up: alt + up arrow
• move line down: alt + down arrow
• duplicate line down: alt + command + down arrow
• delete current line: command + d
• refactor current selection: option + shift + r
• show auto complete: control + space

These function quite a bit more responsively than applescripts (based on my observations), however it will clear out your clip board so be warned, if anyone has any idea about that lemme know.

To install it simply place eclipse-style.pbxkeys in ~/Library/Application Support/Xcode/Key Bindings/ reboot xCode and you should be able to select the key binding file as shown in the screen shot below.

xCode Key Binding Prefs witth Eclipse-Style

Hope this helps, sure makes coding in xCode more fun for me, and helps with the context switching between Eclipse and TextMate and xCode.

.joe

So I need to incorporate or something to that extent, and I am looking for a name for my company… ideas are welcome…

That is all.

So some goals have gone achieved, others are failing… In either case I thought I should take this chance to address some since it’s nearing the 1/3rd mark for this year.

Read at least 3 books for fun - Well I read Watchmen, and V for Vendetta, since they are both “Graphic Novels” I’ll call this one book. I think next I am going to read Solaris, it was on tv the other day and I’ve always wanted to read it since I loved 2001 and it’s supposed to be the Polish equivallent.

Run another half marathon (or at least 10 km) - Been running a lot, however the half is in may, so it’s looking like this will just be a get better at running goal.

Ski at least 20 days - Achieved!

19 days at Fernie

4 days at Revelstoke

3 days at Lake Louise

1 day at Silver Star

1 day at Kimberly

1 day of cat skiing = 29 days total, not a bad showing.

All other goals are… well works in progress, so stay tuned Suckas!

.joe out.

I’ll try and avoid any serious spoilers, but you’ve been warned.

So it’s all over, sigh. I really felt like they could have kept going. For those of you who have been living under a rock, and not seen the best show on earth! Battlestar Galactica (BSG hence forth) is a re-imagining of the original show from the 70s. The show starts off with the holocaust of mankind as we know it (in the show that is) and their escape and search for a new home called, earth.

Now from the outset it seems like just another science fiction drama, with lots of great explosions and so forth, but they really got back to the real essence of Sci Fi. In my humble opinion this essence involves the discussion of big ideas. The settings of science fiction allow the reader to be comfortable discussing things like religion, race, sex, torture, and so on because it is not their reality. This is exactly what BSG leverages. To give you an idea of how dark the show is, within the first 20 minutes of the pilot one of the main characters breaks a baby’s neck… and it gets darker from there.

Alright so the finale… A thing I very much respected about the writers of BSG is that they were not promised 5 season (God only knows why) and rather than have to wrap everything up in 4 episodes because of the network canceling them, they decided to put the show to bed in 4 seasons on their own terms. What made this ending great is the total sense of nihilism it left me with, odd I know, but the whole show you felt like they were building to something huge, and in the end it’s big… but it wasn’t the metaphysical revelations that we may have expected. They paid off on almost everything (with the exception of Starbuck, which they sort of did… but at the same rate didn’t really).

All in all I think this show will stand as one of the great Sci Fi shows of the genre, and in general a great story.

They are coming out with a prequel show called Caprica, but I am not holding my breath for it to be any kind of good. I am however pretty excited about ‘the plan’ teleplay which will come out some time in June.

.joe out.

I’ve been away for the week ripping up Fernie. Having grown up here I am all to familiar with the Skier vs Snowboarder mentality around here. For the balance of my life I’ve sat on the skier side of the argument, especially here where there is so much traversing on a deep pow day boarders just get left behind.

With meg in town, and me trying to get more days in on my pass I decided to give snowboarding a try, and sacrafice a pow day to my board. Turns out, it’s crazy fun.

Granted I fell more yesterday than in probably the last decade of skiing, once i figured out how to float the board on the snow, I started to really enjoy my self.

So my suggestion to you is to go out on a the next big pow day, and just give it a try. It was a blast.

.joe out.

Also you can read my report, and see some photos form fernie at

http://blogs.fernie.com/localsreport/2009/03/04/fernies-skiing-like-whistler/

I’ve been volunteering as a developer for Christmas Future, a local charity founded by my good friend Jay Baydala a few years back, for quite some time. What with my return to the world of working etc etc, I have decided to put about 4 - 8 hours a week into doing a bit of CFoo work.

My current project is building up a small REST API to expose a bit of the data in the DT core to outside developers. Though in this case those outside developers will also be me. I (and Charlie Godsoe) will be using this API to build up a few widgets that will be plugable to all your favorite social networking apps (Facebook, Blogger, MySpace etc) as well as a Dashboard widget and a Vista Gadget.

So all in all there is lots on the go here in C town, so stay tuned, as I finally have something developer-ey to blog about.

.joe

I guess this doesn’t really affect anyone but me, I upgrades to word press 2.7 so far I really like it. They have used the dashboard metaphor quite nicely so now I don’t have to click to much to remove all of the spam comments and such.

Long live open source.

In other news, I’ve hit two more 4 KM runs, and am really starting to believe that this half marathon thing is going to be possible.

UPDATE: I also fixed the Nike Plus plugin to work properly for me… and turned it metric… since miles have little to no meaning to me.

.joe out.

My good friend Paul Lambert sent me a link the other day about Objective-J, another in the host of exciting new web technologies. I am about 20 minutes into the first tutorial but already enjoying it quite a bit. More later as I learn it.

.joe out.

So my night last night was a night of nights. Having come to the end of my undergraduate education I went through the Ritual Calling of the Engineer, and received my Iron Ring. We are told that the ceremony is not for public or press, and so I won’t say much on it, just that it wasn’t what I expected at all.

After the ceremony was over there was the obligatory drinking and merrymaking and I awoke this morning to some coffee and breaky to find out that my NSERC application made it out of the school and into national assessment. For those who don’t know the NSERC PGS M is a masters level grant for two years of study, which basically means I get to go to school for free! Won’t find out for sure until march.

.joe out.