If the words of the Prophet are written on the subway walls, it would seem that lesser disciples got to do the utility access panels:

Life Is Not Hard

It Just Requires Time
Effort Energy
Love of the Devine [sic]
To Reach a New Place Sublime

Follow Your True Heart

And Many Blessings You Shall Find

NXM [??]
Thu June 1, 2006

Mr. Byer has declared that the funeral for the fatguys is now over.

Chris Ware did a huge mural on the facade over 826 Valencia - one of his crazy flowcharts. One of my favorite murals in the city. More info about it is here.

These take you from the end of Henry street to the bend in Roosevelt way. I don't really know who uses them. Maybe the schoolkids.

Amen, Brother Red Demon Rambo Lizard-thing, amen.

As a rule, artifice is a big turn off for me. One exception I make is for the elaborate facades of SF's famous 'painted ladies'

But painting the facade with "windows" (and curtains, no less) is just weird.

Hungry Waif gets around - the city is full of Orfns.

There are two pet cemeteries in San Francisco that I know of. One is a hundred yards from where I sleep. :o

My friend Aaron's band, Red Fang, played at Thee Parkside last Tuesday. Super tight, hard punky metal rock.

The kids that showed up looked like they were going to a Judas Priest concert in 1983. I don't quite get it but it's kinda cool.

A while ago, Byer's clothing warehouse painted over and erased the Fatguys. But fortunately, someone returned to perform proper burial rites.

I've written my first Movable Type plugin: MTMaps. It basically makes it a lot easier to build the kind of photo/blog/map mashup that I've been playing around with lately.

I'm now using it to generate the map for my photojournal of San Francisco. (Which I haven't updated lately because I've been busy re-learning Perl for the 3rd time in order to write this plugin...)

If anyone out there is an MT user and would like to download MTMaps and kick the tires, I'd be much obliged.

I've been playing around some more with Cocoa and Core Data lately. Trying to put my Microsoft Money where my mouth is and write a simple personal finance program. I just want simple rules-based sorting of transactions and some basic pie chart in a simple Mac-like interface. Checking statements should be just like checking email. Anyway.

All-in-all, the experience has not been entirely pleasant. I've tried to remain objective about this. I know learning something new can be painful. I know I can be a curmudgeon about these things. But I've just come to the conclusion that Objective C and Cocoa are just not up to par.

Apple has done a great job of making it very easy to develop a View (in Interface Builder), and they lately have taken a lot of the pain out of the Model (with Core Data). I will say the Core Data is very nice. It's a simple-but-elegant persistence framework for OS X applications. Think stripped-down JDO with a nice GUI builder on top.

Interface Builder has also of course received many well-deserved accolades. However, I think a lot of that acclaim comes from people who have spent a couple hours wiring up a trivial application, written a few simple controllers and said "Gee cool."

Unfortunately, when you try to write non-trivial controllers, things just become painful. I think a fair amount of the pain comes from the XCode IDE, which is very, very 10-years ago. Specifically:

• No refactoring
• No tab completion that is worth using (it's stupid and slow)
• No go to definition
• No 'find all classes that implement Foo'
• Subpar debugger (that I end up having to use far more than I'd like)

I think a lot of these things are just inherently difficult to do in a dynamic language like Objective C. Blame the language or blame the tool, the stuff I've come to rely on just isn't there. I loved CodeWarrior on my PowerMac 6100 back in the 1994, but that doesn't mean I want to use it today.

The tool is really just the tip of the iceberg, though. There is a multitude of painpoints that go beyond tooling:

• No class namespacing mechanism. Ugly prefixes everywhere.
• Manual memory management by reference counting (please).
• Documentation that ranges from excellent to frustratingly incomplete
• 'Informal protocols.' (Apparently, the compiler is actually my enemy).
• General quirkiness in Cocoa: I just spend way too much time googling around to find explanations for bizarre behaviors, only to discover an answer along the lines of "that's just the way it is.

Oh, what could have been if Apple would have just properly supported Java. I understand the momentum from NextStep and all that, but it still sucks that I have to choose between writing a truly native OS X app using nice builder tools on one hand, and using a reasonable and modern programming language on the other.

The oft-heard claim that "Objective C's dynamism is necessary for all of the cool stuff in Cocoa" is baseless - there is no reason the cool stuff could not be done in Java just as well.

Maybe Eclipse or NetBeans will catch up someday. Maybe Swing will continue its trend of sucking less. Maybe we will see Mustang on OS X before 2008. Maybe Sun will actually pull it's head out and enable a truly viral distribution mechanism for the JRE on the desktop.

Maybe, but the historical record is not encouraging.