Thousandapologies

Nice song, played a lot by 102.1 the Edge, my favourite Canadian radio station. Will help against the Friday afternoon weariness at work

Some time ago, I updated my wordpress installation to the most current; something I had postponed quite some time because I expected problems. Like I wrote before, the update itself went ok, but I could not recover most of my previous posts because a bug in wordpress exported all spam comments to the backup file. Unfortunately, this resulted in a backup file so large it could not be imported into the new version of the software. I tried several approaches to reduce the file size, but to no avail. That’s why I finally decided to write a little program to deal with the spam myself, which resulted in my first Mac OS X program ever. After quite a lot of time, today I finally got a working solution that brought the backup file size down from a whopping 44 MB with spam, to a mere 2 MB (with just a little spam) that could be easily imported into the new version of wordpress. I’m happy to announce that as of today all posts from the very beginning of this blog in 2007 are available again. I will try to tidy up the software and put it online for those of you who are looking for a solution to similar problems.

I must say I really love developing for the iPhone; never seen such a complete and helpful API as the one offered by Apple. Also XCode is just brilliant. However, one thing that can be a complete nightmare is code signing. Especially, when developing on the simulator, one doesn’t encounter the specific errors that can stop you from deploying your app to a real device. One such error I encountered already before, but completely forgot about. When trying to deploy my language learning software on a 3G device I suddenly was confronted by a weird error “object file format invalid or unsuitable”, my first suspicions were the JSON framework I recently added. These suspicions turned out to be correct; after finding this helpful blogpost I was finally able to solve the problem. A short recap of what I did:

1. Right click the Target you’re building in my case “Language Learning”, and click on “Get Info”
2. Go to the build tab
3. Find the Code Signing section
4. Add the $(SDKROOT)/ResourceRules.plist to the “Code Signing Resource Rules Path” in this section
5. Clean the build (Build Menu/Clean)
6. Rebuild your app and you should be good to go again

“This is a story about boy meets girl, but it is not a love story”, a remark at the very beginning of this interesting movie 500 days of summer. And indeed, this quote characterises the entire movie very well, because it tells the story of a woman, Summer, who doesn’t believe true love exists and a man, Tom, who is desperately looking for “the one”. When Tom meets Summer he believes he found that one, and what follows is a description of the 500 days they spent together, seen through Tom’s eyes. A hopeless story, because Tom is desperately trying to make it work, and Summer is doubting whether she’s just looking for the causual flirt, or for something more serious. This story is portrayed especially well; as the movie randomly jumps from day to day, from start to end, to middle, and back again, Tom’s emotions seem to follow this randomness. A little bit like Goethe’s “Himmelhoch jauchzend und zum Tode betrübt”, he goes from utter joy and hope the one day, to complete sadness and despair the other, even onto a point that his job starts suffering from it. Summer, on the other hand, seems not too much affected by their relationship, is mostly lighthearted about it, but also does not seem to have a clue of what she really wants. While this sounds like a heavy theme to deal with, the movie does not overwhelm the viewer with sadness or heavy feelings, and the randomn order of events even seems to result in some distance to the topic and makes it a very interesting movie to watch. Especially, Zooey Deschanel, an actress I love to see and who mostly portrays somewhat odd characters, gives Summer the necessary substance that is needed for this movie. And while the relationship between Tom & Zooey does not work out as expected, the movie ends positively and in a happy mood. In short, if you like arthouse movies, this is certainly a movie you should not miss.

Some of you might know I’ve been playing the guitar for quite some time now. Some time ago, I found a great resource for learning to play the guitar, called justinguitar.com. Justin, a great online guitar teacher, of which I spoke before, recommends listening to songs and try to find out how to play them; this to train your ears. Quite recently, I therefore started tabbing out some songs of my favourite artists, all of which I will start to share on the new page above called “Tabs”. Right now, I’ve added “Love Vigilantes” and “Flightless Bird, American Mouth” by Iron & Wine, hope you will enjoy them! Please let me know what you think (especially if you have improvements), and if you have any suggestions for songs, don’t hesitate to let me know. If they are not to extremely difficult I will try to figure them out for you. I will try to add some more tabs soon (Bob Marley & Foo Fighters coming up).

Seems another band has been added to the list of bands at Pinkpop 2010, this time it is the Australian band Wolfmother. Sounds great!

Ok, I admit that although I’m not a teenage girl, I still liked the Twilight Movie a lot. The movie already starts with a catching quote that must have been taken from the book directly, and gathers momentum as it goes. In the beginning, I was still sceptical, thinking for example that Bella’s friends were too damn shallow (they are) and that would they have come at me on my first schoolday I probably would’ve been freaked out by them. While most of the supporting characters stay shallow, the relationship between Edward (a Vampire) and Bella (Human) develops during the film and the tension between them is clearly felt throughout. Most of all, I think the movie was a good mixture of romance, tension and action and is beautifully shot; especially the American scenery is breathtaking. And hey, a movie that has Flightless Bird of Iron & Wine on its soundtrack has to do a lot to lose my favour . Anyway, a good way to spend a Friday evening and the film has made me curious about the books too. One thing I thought quite funny was that both this movie & the True Blood series have Vampires and mind readers in them, and both use the theme of attraction between them, wonder whether that was a coincidence.

Beautiful cover from the Across the Well Album (original is by New Order), Update: TAB can be found here.

After reading Nick Hornby’s awesome book High Fidelity (which also has a brilliant movie version with one of my top 5 actors John Cusack), I decided to check out more of his work, and I stumbled across the novel About a boy. I already saw the movie before reading the book, and found the story quite interesting. Normally, a movie featuring Hugh *Vomit* Grant is reason enough for me to quickly turn off a movie, but surprisingly his appearance in this movie was not too nauseating. The book is quite similar to the movie and tells us about Will, an enormously rich and jobless single who’s life does not contain any form of stress or excitement whatsoever. By a chance encounter, Will discovers that beautiful, single mothers, who normally would not think of dating him twice are prepared to go out with him now, and out of boredom and desperation he decides to subscribe for SPAT, a single parent talk group, even if this means he has to create an imaginary two-year old son Ned. Via SPAT Will gets to know Marcus, a 12 year old real boy with a manic depressive mother; an encounter which will change Will’s life for ever. Again Nick Hornby surprises with a wittingly written book that addresses a very serious topic in a light way. Even if the tone of the book is not dramatic at all, the events in it make you reflect, and the way Hornby addresses the main topics of loneliness, growing up, and friendships, is just brilliant. The irony and humour make it that you can follow the story with a bit of emotional distance ,which make the main topics all the more clearer. If you liked the ironic, sarcastic, sometimes absurd, and definitely British humour of High Fidelity, you will definitely like About A Boy too.

Thanks to Tally…