I took a picture [Down under edition]

Circular Quay, the Opera House & the CBD taken from the Sydney Harbour bridge in HDR with 3 exposures.

iOS 5 & UITableView datasources

It's been a big week for me, primarily because one of our client apps exploded, in no short part to Facebook screwing me over ... but i digress.

Last week also saw me finally upgrade to Lion, enable full disk encryption (Might blog about this later), and start compiling against iOS 5.

As is usual with big changes in the SDK there are always a few bugs, however this one had me confused for a couple of days.

After compiling against iOS 5, i got this message after popping one of the view controllers.

-[YOUR UITableViewDataSource tableView:cellForRowAtIndexPath:]: message sent to deallocated instance 0x6e78420

Simple, i did something dumb, and over released my datasource class ... But it only happens on iOS 4, not iOS 5. [Cue twilight zone music]. And this code had been stable for well over 6 months before the SDK change [Increase volume].

Generally i a release and nil my objects and set any delegates to nil in my dealloc method. However in this instance i had forgotten to nil out the UITableView's dataSource and delegate properties. The solution was simply:

[_tableView setDataSource:nil];
[_tableView setDelegate:nil];

Now, i'm aware this is 100% my fault, you're always supposed to nil out pointers to non-retained/ weakly referenced objects. As a result i haven't bothered to file a Radar. (Dear apple, you caused me to find a bug in my code ... yeah) However as you can see, for one reason or another i was able to "get away" with it for months, so this post is a fair warning to all to lookout for this.

I took a picture [30 Rock edition]

Midtown Manhattan, New York City, NY from 30 Rockafella Center (No tripod)

The 6 Month Club

This past tuesday signalled my entry into the "6 month travel" club. Usually when someone is travelling for 6 months they would have been all over the place, however i prefer to move at slightly slower pace. As a result i've "only" visited 4 countries (Iceland,USA, Jamaica, Australia).

I've been blessed with being able to meet some really nice, and interesting people along the way. Overall it's been an rewarding experience. I've got no real plan, i tend to think about my next step about a month before i take it, with the general rule being "go west".

I look forward to the next 6 months, and God willing, it will be even better than the previous 6 months.

在天

I took a picture [Steve Jobs Edition]

Steve Jobs on stage @ WWDC 11 introducing iCloud

He who learns but does not think is lost; he who thinks but does not learn is in danger.

I've been in Australia for a 6 weeks now. The majority of that time has been spent bitching about how cold it was, and coding like beast to help get mChat ready for its next big release.

As a result I haven't really done any sightseeing, or at least I hadn't.

As a preparation exercise for when I go to South America I decided to take a bus from Sydney to Melbourne via Canberra. Total journey time came in at seat warming 15 hours.

I love having time to think, and I love to learn so the Confucius quote I used for the title of this post seemed perfect.

So what have I learnt?
Australia is huge and almost infinitely vast. At the moment I'm a hour and half into the Canberra, Melbourne leg. And all I've seen is grasslands. They extend for as far as the eye can see.

Having spent so much time in relatively small countries, buried in a mountain of technology you begin to think that the world is a small place. But in fact the "small" part is the series of interconnected hubs that form the major population centres. Outside of these you can find the "real world". One devoid of fibre, hi-speed rail, politics, and all the other assorted junk that we consider "modern civilisation".

So what do I think?
A good friend of mine what's to change the planet. Not in a "when I grow up" kind of way either. We often discuss how one would go about such a task. Perhaps to change the world what we need to happen is the reversal of the migration of people across the world to urban centres, in such of relatively low paid jobs.

Perhaps we need to allow people to return to the ways of the past, to build a better future.

In recent years anyone reading this would have seen slow destruction of society. As we have moved into the future we are slowly abandoning parts of our past that actually worked.

That's really insightful, so what can I do?
I haven't got a clue. If you'll excuse me I have another 8 hours on this bus. You never know, as I bridge the gap between these two centres of commerce and industry I might just discover the answer ...

I took a picture [Stanford Edition]

Hover Tower, Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA