This is my cheatsheet for using Microsoft's Entity Framework API.
(The existence of this page should not be taken as an endorsement of Entity Framework. It's not something you should learn more about if you don't have to. It's just another complicated ORM framework with its own quirks and annoyances …
A recent study indicates that Apple's Siri doesn't perform very well when searching for information. I think most people who use Siri would agree, but "searching" is only one thing that Siri does.
I don't use Siri much for general question-asking. ("Siri, is it raining?") Instead, I use Siri as …
I'm a fan of The Setup, a website containing interviews with people about the tools they use to do their jobs. It is just "productivity porn", but I find it interesting.
As a tribute, here is my own "interview" for The Setup, using the standard four questions. I don't expect …
It was 20 years ago this month that I graduated from college and got my first professional programming job. It has me reminiscing about what the computer programming profession was like before the Internet.
I had used the Internet in college. However, back then we didn't have web browsers. We …
As an iOS software developer, I am often asked whether "we" (a team I'm working with, or someone I'm advising) should avoid using Objective-C and instead use a higher-level or easier-to-learn programming language. In general, my answer is "No". The rest of this post explains why.
A bit …
My iOS applications use property list (plist) files to specify configuration parameters and other stuff. I was trying to do some comparison and merging of these plists, but was tripped up because the keys were in different order in different files.
So I whipped up a little Python script to …
I read a lot of science fiction (SF) in my adolescent and teenage years, but I got bored with it in college, and stopped reading it. Actually, I didn't get bored, I got annoyed with it. At the time, I couldn't describe exactly what it was that was annoying me …
Mac OS X provides a pretty nice data-binding technology for developers, called Cocoa bindings. Unfortunately, the Cocoa bindings mechanism is not available to iOS developers, so iOS developers have to spend a lot of time writing code to keep user-interface elements and data in sync.
However, while Cocoa Bindings is …