I’m probably saying nothing new to any seasoned Windows developer, but it was new to me: if you add a watch in VisualStudio for the value @ERR,hr (no quotes) you get the human-readable error string for the error code that would be returned by GetLastError() if you called it and then ran it through FormatMessage(). I was amazingly happy to discover this little tidbit of functionality, since previously I had thought I had to look up the value on the MSDN System Error pages.

I say nothing that should surprise diehard Mac users if I say that Mac OS X lacks decent power-user mail clients. Thunderbird suffers from a lot of the same problems as Firefox, Entourage is…well, Entourage, and Mail, pretty though it may be, is heavily underpowered in a lot of key areas. (E.g., you can’t even create nicely formatted lists, which is something I need to do quite frequently.) From this motley crew, I’ve traditionally opted to use Thunderbird. Yes, it’s ugly and doesn’t integrate…

This probably is, more than anything else, simply an indication of how little I’ve been following the Squeak community lately, but I was extremely happy to discover that Squeak will be on the [OLPC](https:// wiki.laptop.org/go/The_OLPC_Wiki). The concentration appears to be on [eToys] (https://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5580), an extension of Morphic that allows kids (and, with considerably more effort, adults) to make interactive graphics without writing code. If you’re interested, Google Video…

As you may or may not be aware, one of the features of Mac OS X Leopard is called iChat Theater. iChat Theater allows you to share arbitrary sound and video via AIM. The feature is great for end-users; showing a friend a funny movie clip, or your parents a photo album of your kid, has become wonderfully trivial. In what for Apple qualifies as a rare nod for developers, they have publicly exposed a clean API to allow your applications to hook into this framework. Basically, all an application…

Apple announced Objective-C 2.0, the first major change to the language ever. The features should all be great—support for properties, inbuilt iterator syntax, much higher abstraction in the runtime, and more—but ultimately, though many of these modifications attempt to solve real problems in Objective-C, they nearly universally solve them inelegantly and inconsistently. One of my biggest complaints comes with the iterator extension. In Objective-C 1.0, to iterate over a collection, you had to…

After a semester of virtually no coding, I’m preparing to return to New York to do more work for Fog Creek on Fog Creek Copilot. This will be the first time in my career that I’m returning to a code base that I haven’t seen in a bit over a year. In some ways, this is very exciting. Knowing that something I put so much time and effort into has proven to be truly useful to a large number of people is extraordinarily gratifying, and getting a fresh chance to fix all the little things that I ran…

So, today I spent roughly two hours hacking the MySQL driver for Squeak to add the DESCRIBE command and adding MySQL support to ROE. ROE is an awesome package that lets you write queries directly in relational algebra in your Smalltalk code. It generates all of the SQL to actually execute the query and delays execution until as late as possible. The effect is very nice. I’m currently working on a tutorial for how to use ROE in Seaside, and as part of that, I thought it’d be nice to add MySQL…

Sometimes, you’re confronted with someone who so stubbornly refuses to understand what you’re saying that you just want to cry. Let’s ignore for the moment that a lot of the hype around Rails is…well, hype. Even with that in mind, contrast the tutorial video for Rails with the tutorial video for Trails, a JSP-based framework that aims to do the same thing. Even if you completely ignore issues like scaffolding, the difference between these two videos makes me downright sad. For example: Methods…