The Genius of Chris Ware

I just picked up from the post office my copy of The Acme Novelty Library #19. I had pre-ordered it on Amazon an age ago and completely forgot about it so was very happy to see it ship on Friday. Pity it then took me another 5 days to get it into my hands but it was worth it. The back cover is a joy.
Unfortunately I don't have the book to hand so can't put a transcript of it here. Basically its a political riff about convenient south american subjugation.

Admittedly it could be considered another retelling of the Jimmy Corrigan tale - How an awkward child grew out of a dysfunctional family into an even more awkward adult - but seeing as the telling is so very very good I can forgive. The first part of the book "The seeing eye dogs of Mars" is fantastic. It's apparently a short story written by Rusty Brown about the failed relationship of a colonist sent to seed Mars with human life. I have only started reading it (greedily) after ripping open the package but have shown discipline and put it down until Saturday morning when I will lie in bed drinking coffee and eating fresh fruit bread and enjoy it in full.

Gears of Gore

A capture from a recent multiplayer death match. Nufkin takes down some Locust scum.

Can't stop listening to...

Balaclava by Nu:Tone.
It's on "The Future Sound of Cambridge" from Hospital. The rest of the
album has some cracking tracks on it too but this is the stand out
call for a rewind monster in my books.
The tune is exactly how I want my Drum&Bass. Melodic, trancy and
juicy. Seriously, get a hold of this one by any means necessary.

RE: At Bloody Last.

Kirk asks: "You gonna release it freeware?"

My aims at the moment are:

1. package the cyberlink c library into a UIKit compatible library and release it (obviously free as this is someone elses library. indeed they have mentioned that they will support iPhone anyway so I should really contact them).
2. package a Sonos zone manipulation wrapper around that and release.
3. Create an app for me. If its good enough (and if I ever get an official developer license then release it)

will the final application be free? Right now I don't know. Probably. If only because I do not have the time to provide any kind of support for users. Maybe a honesty box approach although that would undoubtedly prove a block to getting it on the app-store as its either free or Apple takes a cut.
For me its a labor - not of love - but of geek pride. I just want to prove to myself that I can do this and it keeps me brain active.

UPnP Control Prototype

After a full day of hacking (including a couple of updates to libraries, SDKs, and OS patching) I have got a (f'ugly) application that;

1. looks at my network for UPnP devices
2. finds those that look like Sonos zones and puts them in a dropdown
   
3. queries the queue of the selected device and displays back meta data
4. displays the album art of the current track

I have learnt a whole metric ass-ton about;

• Xcode
• Objective C pointers
• XML Parsing in Obj C
• UPnP
• Cocoa garbage collection
• Initialisation ordering in Cocoa

Tomorrow I am going to see if I can cross compile and port it onto the iPhone and then it's really going to get complicated when I start implementing the control operations. Oh and of course I will have a whole new GUI framework to learn. again.

Autum sun

Still warm enough to sit outside and have a cup of tea despite being
surrounded by fallen leaves.

At Bloody Last!

Finally got a UPNP SDK compiled in XCode AND succesfully browsing my network and finding all the Sonos ZonePlayers. It really was easy once I found the right library to use. Now all I have to do is cross compile it for the iPhone and I am onto the path.

Of course there is already an app in the appstore that controls Sonos but its $15 and I want to do my own.