Published on
September 29, 2005 in
Geek.
(Last post tonight, I swear!)
The FedEx day today was pretty cool. Jens and I worked on polishing up Mike's calendar macro, and I'm proud to say it's available now. Unfortunately, we spent a good chunk of the day trying to get the AJAX responses formatted correctly across a whole bunch of actions (ick), so we didn't get as much as we would have liked done. It's a bit rough around the edges, and has limited functionality, but it's getting there. If I have time in the future, it's definitely something I'd like to pursue. The AJAX used in it is also quite hacky. I looked into wrapping DWR around it, but it wouldn't work with the plugin system we're using (no way to dynamically load the DWR beans from the plugins, as far as I can tell), which would have made implementing it SO much easier.
We had a presentation on a number of the other tasks for the day, and I must say there were some REALLY cool ideas that came out of it… if any of them end up being released, it'd be great. 
UPDATE: Jonathan Nolen has posted about his FedEx Day, all the way over in San Francisco. I have no idea what he was working on, but it seems like he had fun!
Published on
September 29, 2005 in
Code.
John Siracusa has initiated an interesting discussion about automatic memory-management vs Cocoa's retain/release system… I can see the arguments for both sides.
It's handy in Java to not have to worry about releasing objects after using them. It's also neat in Objective-C/Cocoa, at times, as you can *almost* have the best of both worlds with NSAutoreleasePools ("autoreleased" objects are collated into the pool, and either released by the application at certain times, or when you release a pool you created) and retain/release methods. It's also neat when writing a for loop dealing with lots of data, to be able to say "I definitely don't want this hanging around in memory any more! Get rid of it!", without having to wait for the garbage collector to pick it up (and the memory usage going up in the process).
Would automatic memory-management be useful? Sure. I'd spend less time making sure I'm properly retaining/releasing objects, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over it (actually… maybe I am, given the time I'm writing this post). The Cocoa (and related APIs) are great to use, and if I have to put up with "semi-automatic" memory management, then so be it!
Published on
September 29, 2005 in
Geek.
Charles has written about the Confluence team's "Wall of Death", which is currently in force. I agree that it's an excellent way to focus attention and convey progress towards the next release, although I've probably taken a bit too long on some of my tasks.
