I was receiving a pointer to an NSNumber in a recursive function and wanted to increment it so that the ultimate caller eventually would have the value. I guess I could use an int internally then set the pointer to the NSNumber to the final result of the int, but that seemed like just as much work. Anyway, I'm ditching Objective-C now that Swift is here, so it's no longer an issue

It may not measure up to whatever fly-by-night languages to which you might compare it, but it's a MAJOR and LONG OVERDUE replacement for Objective-C, which is the only language any serious Mac developer has had to put up with. I for one welcome our new Swift overlords.

I had to figure out how to increment an NSNumber over the weekend. It's not pretty:

NSNumber *num = [NSNumber numberWithInt:[num intValue] + 1];

... UNINSTALL! I refuse to have a Facebook account and if Whatsapp starts making it mandatory to have one, then I'll go back to plain old SMS.

I thought "gold pressed latinum" was the preferred currency of moneyed-types in the alpha quadrant? I couldn't imagine Quark dealing in any other kind, certainly not the ordinary non-gold pressed variety.

I created a custom email alias for Linked In and use a really nasty randomly-generated password which I store in a password manager, so they'll never get anything else out of me. I also never put my work Outlook email address and password in. I'm not THAT stupid :-) Some people obviously are, but I'd hardly call that Linked In's fault.

Sorry, it has to be done: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE

We have election scrutineers from each party to observe the process. I've done it once before and we all watch the boxes like hawks, and the counting of ballot papers, too. You'd only need sturdy metal boxes if the ballot boxes had to be collected by, say, your local govt-friendly militia to transport them to a "safe" counting location (i.e., where their contents are simply replaced anyway).

Democracy in Australia is one of the best-functioning in the world. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. If you do, you end up with the US system where elections are a complete farce. It's amazing how they hold themselves up as a beacon of democracy to the world. Their elections are less free than some dictatorships!

There is no way that the Australian Labor Party could be considered Centre Right, not in a million years. They're more Centre Left than anything, and Greens Left or Far Left. And by extension the Liberal/National Coalition could be Centre Right or Right. They both compete for the centre ground.

The argument that three greens are a viable alternative simply because they aren't one of the major parties is a very poor argument indeed. Their policies would ruin this country utterly! The Liberals appoint their leadership through a ballot in the parliamentary party room. You don't like it, vote for somebody else. It has worked fine for a long time and just because Labor is tearing itself to bits, doesn't mean the Libs have to change to suit people who wouldn't vote for them anyway.

I have sometimes routed my preferences to ultimately land with the Liberals but upon finding out that they would be deprived of my AEC-funding as a result, most definitely I'll be putting a "1" in the Liberal/National Coalition box this time. Thank you, kind sir :-) You've done me a great service.

They might come from the "social democratic" tradition but there's nothing democratic about the Australian Labor Party. They're the masters of branch stacking and rigging votes, especially through union representation at national conferences. The party has become a joke and the sooner they're turfed in the coming months, the better. They need a few terms in the wilderness to clean up their filthy act.

Might have something to do with the fact that most ebooks (and particularly the reading software for same) totally suck! The Kindle reader is almost entirely devoid of features. Its bookmarking facility is a joke! Add to that the lack of real-world page numbers and instead you get numbers that go into their tens of thousands; I guess it's a word/character count or something, but you can't use that in a footnote reference! If they're going to give you this bizarre substitute for page numbers then they could at least put something in the interface that shows you the equivalent dead-tree-edition page number. It's the little things like this that totally turn me off. Even PDFs from reliable, DRM-free, publishers such as O'Reilly often have problems copying code samples - lately I've been getting bizarre Unicode private use characters! That's not very handy. Overall, I will only buy ebooks for technical tutorials, references, etc. Fiction and other non-technical-fiction has to be dead-tree!

I've also grown tired of the need to find a new distro every 18 months to two years when the one I happen to have been using for a while decides to embrace batshit crazy as its new philosophy. I've used most of the major distros in my time except Red Hat/Fedora. My last distro was Debian after Ubuntu ruined everything with Unity, but even Debian with GNOME 2.3x wasn't doing it for me any more. My new PC hardware also seemed to have some stability issues so I just decided to jump ship. Another consideration was a decision to write software for Mac/iOS to make money. Nobody makes money writing software for Linux (not easily, anyway), and Apple has a loyal customer base used to not being afraid to spend money on good/useful software.

I have to say that Time Machine is great, and transferring a user account/profile from one Mac OS install to another is dead simple. Microsoft could learn a thing or two about how Apple does this (the User State Migration Tool for desktop admins is utter rubbish by comparison). Switching to Mac was made easier knowing that it's fundamentally UNIX underneath, so I have the best of both worlds. A rich ecosystem on the desktop where batshit crazy isn't foisted on its users willy nilly and a foundation that's rock solid. What more could I ask for? And most of my favourite OSS software is available on Mac, anyway, like Open Office and The GIMP. No brainer, really.

Why should I put in hours and hours trying to make bad software usable? I used Linux for 5 years until 8 months ago when I finally gave up on Linux because GNOME 2.30 was consigned to the dustbin and I got sick of the alternatives. Since then I've bought a Mac and never been happier. Sure, the Finder is utterly pathetic, and I pine for a taskbar to replace the dock, but apart from those two abominations, every other aspect of the Mac experience is without equal. So having a crappy file manager and no task bar is a price worth paying. But since GNOME shell ruined more than it improved, the Mac is by far the lesser of all the evils currently on offer. Sorry, Linux, but your fascination with throwing the baby out with the desktop environment bath water every few years is doing more harm than good; it's alienating users more than it's winning new converts!

PS: yes, I also wish my home and end keys actually did something useful on the Mac; thank goodness for the Keyfixer Firefox addon.