Quarter Life Crisis
The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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Running¶
503 words
Because it went rather well in November and many people asked to have another one, we are having another Running Dinner this weekend. We wanted this to be really big but despite the very positive feedback, most of the people who participated the last time didn’t join this time. While that’s very strange, it also means that we are going to see many new people this time around which will at least be more interesting for those who chose to come along a second time.
Many of the people who participate this time have no (i.e. coming from further away) or a very small flat, meaning they can’t host a meal at their place. That made planning the routes and everything much more difficult as we had to use every single location that was offered, even when they are at inconvenient locations or that meant that the same kitchen will be used for several courses by several people during the evening.
I’ve just sent out the notification e-mails using the AppleScript I wrote the last time. And AppleScript is really painful. I didn’t want to spend too much time writing the script which means that it doesn’t do too many checks whether data from the address book actually exists and so on. What really sucks about AppleScript is that it just stops running a script in such a situation where a variable is ‘missing’ rather than going on with an empty string or something. That’d really be good enough for most purposes and save me the pain of having the script fail after generating half od the e-mail messages (at a painfully slow speed).
Somehow I couldn’t help thinking that the supposedly much more difficult Objective-C is much more user-friendly in that respect because it’ll happily continue running even when encountering a few nil objects. (Just consider my usage of ‘user friendly’ in the previous sentence to be a seriously twisted one.) This may be bad programming but it still works – and that’s exactly what scripts that you only run a handful of times are about.
After getting X.4 I had a quick glance at CoreData and thought about making a proper Running Dinner planner application with it. It was really great to define the objects and get a basic UI for them for free. Amazing stuff. But that doesn’t make a proper application yet and a lot of things would still have to be added, so I decided to not actually do it as it’d be quite a waste of time. Particularly as I ran into a couple of places where I found that I couldn’t (easily) make my data objects to be exactly the way I wanted them. And as CoreData is still very knew there don’t seem to be many knowledgeable people or notes of advice around. (Another problem I ran into is that I couldn’t figure out how to write a key-path to access, say, the second object of an array for key-value-coding.)
Yikes! Enough random notes.
