GeoffSteffens.com

Apr 01

“Those who stand for nothing are easily led” — Unknown

Mar 31

wordboner:

Being Nothing (see full version, recommended | get this on a tee | get this on a tee in European store | make your own tee | get this on a postcard)

Mar 30

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.” — Virginia Woolf  (via kari-shma)

Mar 28

preciousanne:

myteenagefairytale:

(via fuckyeahladygaga)

Mar 26

“It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.” — e.e. cummings (via kari-shma)

Jan 18

Tokyo is giving me a headache already.. and I haven’t even left !

Jan 12

ohhh it’s all so clear now.

rahmin:

hiten:

brit:

“The Disney org chart, on the other hand, is based on process, from the story idea through direction to the final release of the film. All of the staff positions are in the service of supporting this work flow. Perhaps the question now is what should the org chart of the future look like, given the global workforce, telecommuting personnel, virtual employees, outsourced jobs and contract workers who sometimes outnumber salaried staff?”

Via DISNEY’S ORG CHART

The Disney org chart (click here for full size) is a thing of beauty. Thinking it would look good framed.

(via fatalistichues)

Dec 20

heyinternet:

moltz:

The White House Flickr stream

So torn.

He is so cool.

Dec 18

Least painful way to build a DAL with Monotouch

Data access in monotouch (C# for iphone) is a royal pain in the ass. I know most developers, whether C# or objc, are just stuffing SQL statements directly into their code but is one of my pet hates.  Consequently I’ve been looking for a way around it.

As it turns out there’s no nice solution but there’s a half way solution that sucks a bit less.

It’s all Apple’s fault

The iPhone ships with sqlite (good) but it is unfortunately sqlite v3.0 (bad) which lacks the ability to expose schema information (v. bad). Consequently, schema querying which most ORM’s rely on doesn’t work.

Things that don’t work

1. NHibernate - reflection at runtime, it just can’t work
2. Datasets backed by an sqlite ADO.NET 2 provider, ie System.Data.SQLite - won’t work for several reasons but mainly System.Data.SQLite makes runtime schema queries, which fails 
   
   
3. catnap-orm - this really had me excited. A nice simple but fully fledged ORM for monotouch.  The author developed it specifically for iPhone+monotouch, paid Novell his license fee and then discovered it doesn’t currently work on the device due to bugs in the MONO framework.  Novell are currently ignoring the problems - more people need to winge on the mailing lists to motivate them. I know I will be.
   
   
4. MyGeneration code generator + doodads sqlite - this one was a long shot. MyGeneration is a template code generator, and doodads one of the DAL code architectures it can spit out.  Unfortunately under the hood it too makes calls to runtime schema queries on the database, leading to failure

At this point I really wanted to put my foot thru my iMac’s screen and snap my iPhone in half.  No, really.

Salvation

One I came across early but dismissed was sqlite-net. It’s a very thin wrapper over sqlite, provides basic class mapping but still requires SQL to be embedded in your app.  It provides no assistance performing updates.  The upside is it handles the task of transferring results into your DTO’s and auto-updating primary keys post insert.

It’s not ideal but it’s still a better than nothing.  Personally I really hope Novell address the issues holding back catnap-orm because it is awesome.

I hope this post saves some poor developer their sanity.