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PostgreSQL Commander Is the Operator Layer AI-Built Apps Are Missing
AI can generate a lot of code. It cannot run your database responsibly.
Recent Writing
Rest in Peace, Dennis Ritchie
To quote Jan Eggum: "Kor e alle heltane" (where are all our heroes, for you non-norwegians). Dennis Ritchie passed away today. That is Richie as in &R in K&R C, or The Book. Without Dennis, I'd probably not known my good friend Dag-Erling. I'd probably be writing Pascal. I'd probably given up on computing after having led the DemOS project in assembler and Pascal. Dag-Erling would not have been a FreeBSD committer. I would not have written my thesis about the FreeBSD project. There would be no Mac OS X, or iPhone. At least not the way we know it. There would be no /dev.
SproutCore used for iCloud?
Looking through the page source for iCloud.com I couldn't but help how much SC was all over the place. That rang a bell. Apple has been helping out the SproutCore project before, so could it be that iCloud is based on Sprout Core? I bet it is 
Time to put in that work to learn SproutCore that I had planned on doing a few months ago.
Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs
Dear Steve,
you have shown us that we don't understand what we think we understand, and must redo what we think is done, in order to go forward. You've tought us not to accept mediocracy, not from ourselves and not from the world around us. Strive for passionate perfection, every day, with love. Love for what we do and those that surround us.
iTunes movie purchase and rental available in
Finally, after having sent mails to people high up at Apple, signing petitions, joining groups and blogging about it for many years, iTunes movie rental and purchase is coming to Scandinavia, possibly the world. That is great, we have been missing it for ages. Thank you, Apple, for allowing us to send you money 
Like many other people, I'm looking forward to trying out this service, especially the rental service.
Mercurial tagging for XCode
I've used many version control systems, but this week has been the first time I've used Mercurial for anything more than a bit of testing. It looks good to me, so I read a bit around to see how people are using it in their projects, and I came accross Lajos Kamocsay's post about how he includes Mercurials branch and revision information in his Xcode projects that I think deserves a shout-out.
Updating an Address Book record
When updating an Address Book record in Cocoa, I read that I had modify the record using ABRecordSetValue(). But it wouldn't change. Even if I called ABAddressBookSave() afterwards, it just wouldn't change. It turns out I had to call ABAddressBookAddRecord() also. There is no ABAddressBookUpdateRecord(), but it turns out that the ABAddressBookAddRecord function does the same. I expected that it would give me a duplicate record, but it does not, it updates the existing record. Glad to have that sorted out, I hope this helps you as well.
A quick & comprehensive guide type guide
I'm sorry if this is all over the net today, but I really find this a great info graphic, by Noodlor. I link directly to his graphic:
Android isn\'t open source, what now\?
So Google's admitted that Android is not open source. Some parts are, some parts are not. That's the same with iOS. Many parts of iOS are from open source projects (I'll mention cups, the printer stack on many Linux systems, that is very much supported by Apple, even though it's GPL). Heck, even Microsoft Windows has components from open source projects (the ftp client being my favourite example). To me, it's not so much about these projects being open source, as what do they give back to the open source projects.
Extending iMessage
I hate instant messaging. Not because I don't like talking to people, but because there are so many networks I have to be part of, and once I'm signed up I have to use this program or that program, which means I have to have a ton of programs running, or I can wait a while and get a program that does a half decent job at implementing many different networks and then have a few more programs running to open what that program doesn't support. So I log off, and never log back in again. I would really like to use IM, I would really like to be more available that way, but it's such a hassle.
Tapptics
I thought I'd give Tapptics a little plug. I love writing nice applications for the iPhone, but taking on a graphics artist for pet projects is sometimes a bit hard to justify. But a while ago I read about Tapptics and saw their site and bookmarked the article so I could come back to it when I had a project where I needed some graphics. That time has come, so I signed up and it's just a bucket full of resources, both nice tutorials and guides, and a lot of excellent graphics to use in my app. There were, however, two glyphs that I wanted that weren't there, but no sooner had I enquired about them, had Jen whipped them up: two gorgeous glyphs that will have a prominent position in my app. The price is well worth it, so go check Jen's site out today. If you're an app developer and need nice graphics, you'll love it!