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This is the example code from my REAL World presentation on declares. As I did last year, I asked for a declare someone in the audience was wanting to have written, and did it on the spot to show how to go from finding the docs to having working code. This year, someone needed to find a list of available encodings. This code only works on the Mac currently.

Function AvailableEncodings() As TextEncoding()
  Dim out() As TextEncoding
  
  #If TargetCarbon
    Declare Function CFStringGetListOfAvailableEncodings Lib "CoreFoundation" As Ptr
    Const kCFStringEncodingInvalidId = &hffffffff
    
    Dim list As Ptr = CFStringGetListOfAvailableEncodings
    Dim i As Integer
    While list.Int32(i * 4) <> kCFStringEncodingInvalidId
      out.Append Encodings.GetFromCode( list.Int32( i * 4 ) )
      i = i + 1
    Wend
  #EndIf
  
  Return out
End Function

Enjoy!

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An interesting hobby of mine in traffic has always been to try to alleviate the stop and goes by doing a lot more coasting than jamming on the brakes. It has always annoyed me that people tailgate and keep flashing their brakes, which in turn causes the people behind them to flash their brakes as well. During the even slower times, I contemplate how fun it would be to write traffic simulation software — a project I just haven’t tackled yet.

I ran across this website the other day. It talks about how one person can make a difference in improving traffic. It talks about how traffic often moves in waves, and interesting situation and how you can solve a traffic jam in some situations. I don’t know if I fully agree on everything, but it certainly is an interesting read.

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So, this post is purely American politics, so feel free to skip over it if you aren’t interested. Ever since the last presidential debates, I’ve been hearing a lot about Ron Paul, or more specifically how his early success has been masked and/or spun.

In all honesty though, I didn’t watch the debates. It took a post on Reddit “BILL MAHER on the offensive against RON PAUL on “Real Time”” to get me to watch a video showcasing his views. And to me, they’re honestly refreshing.

After seeing another Ron Paul story come across Reddit this morning, I took the time to go to his site and have a look around, and I have to say that he talks the talk of what I have always felt the government should be. It’s quite refreshing to hear someone who has such drastically different ideas than we’ve seen in recent years, and also to hear that Americans like what they hear.

He has a video compilation of debate questions on his campaign website. If anyone is interested in finding out more about Ron Paul that’s a good starting place. But if you’re someone who is already familiar with him, I’m curious to hear what your likes or dislikes are about his policies, and whether or not you feel he’s stood up to what he says with his actions.

Sorry for the short aside into politics. I’d like to see us not make the same mistake again.

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I’ve updated the Todoist Quicksilver module. The current version is now A0. You can download it here.

The new things in this version are:

• The number of projects now shows up in the Quicksilver “Catalog” pane.
• A reverse command for [Project] Add Todoist item… [Text] has been added.
• A new command [Project] Go To Project has been added to open the selected project in Todoist.
• Support for the item format of “My Todo Item @ today at 10pm” to assign a due date while submitting the item. More information on this can be found on Todoist

We have a few more ideas up our sleeves that we’re continuing work on. Enjoy!

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Well REAL World 2007 ended this past weekend, and now that I’ve finally recovered from the long week, I’ll post a quick update. Overall things went extremely well this year. I met some new faces, and was able to talk to a lot of “old” faces as well. The face to face time is really great, and being able to be candid about bugs or features (or bugs that are really features) without having to “be on the record,” so to speak, is excellent not only for me but for the people I’m chatting with.

My two sessions went pretty well, although my demo in my Subversion one flopped. I had a script of what actions I was going to do, and these actions are things I do every day. But I never do them to new projects, and I quickly ran into a line endings issue and instead of spending the 5 minutes to fix it right then and there, I decided to proceed anyways, and it kept haunting me. From what I heard, people still learned quite a bit, and hopefully I answered all of the follow up questions adequately.

For everyone that came this year, thank you for doing so. But even if you don’t come, I hope to see you next year!

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