Open Season

I’ve finished my Maya Date iPhone application and it’s now available on the iTunes store! Hooray!

A couple of people have asked me about my earlier post regarding the bug in Apple’s date software, which causes dates chosen with the date picker before the year 1582 to come out wrong.

Before I discuss it, you can see the bug for yourself (I’ve only tested this on versions 3.0 and 3.1 of the iPhone OS). Go to Contacts and pick anyone in your list. Choose Edit, scroll down and select add field, then scroll down again and choose Birthday. You’ll see a date picker, and your chosen date in a little box above it. Give your fingertip a workout and scroll the years back, back, back, to 1583. You can see in the screenshot below that I took these pictures on September 22 (that’s why September 22 is in blue). I left the month and day alone and scrolled back to the year 1583. The window above the picker reads “September 22, 1583″. All seems well.

Almost. Look at the year wheel. Uh… where did 1582 go?

And now starts the fun.

Go back one step on the year wheel. We’re now lost in time. The screenshot below tells the story:

Continue reading ‘iPhone Calendar Bugs’ »

iPhone learning continues apace. Today I discovered a surprising interaction between tab bars and action sheets. This is worth remembering for my own sake, but I think it’s also worth passing on for three reasons. First, if you happen to have just this problem, I can save you some time. Second, it illustrates how looking at something can lead us to jump to wrong conclusions. Finally, it points out that in our wonderful new technological world, we have to deal regularly with a nightmare of crazy detail.
Continue reading ‘Mixing Tab Bars and Action Sheets’ »

I’ve started learning how to program the iPhone.  It’s a very interesting beast.

My first application uses the built-in UIDatePicker object (that’s the slot machine with wheels for picking a date).  I want my app to handle historical times, so I scrolled the wheel for the year back a couple of centuries, and noticed some very strange behavior.  When you ask the date picker for the selected date, you get back an NSDate object.  If you print that out, then you’ll find that the date you get back sometimes does NOT match the date on the wheels.  This is of course a disaster for any application.  Try it yourself: spin the wheels around to May 15, 1152, and check the NSDate returned by the picker object: you’ll get May 8, 1153.  One year and 7 days wrong.

And unfortunately, as you move around you’ll find the days continue to shift: May 15 in the year 852 reports as May 11, 853.  Now one year and 4 days wrong.  It’s a problem, but we can fix it.  Continue reading ‘The Curious UIDatePicker’ »

There are many books and even TV shows with titles like 1000 Places To See Before You Die and 100 Things To Do Before You Die. I figure just to be complete we should have a similar compendium of websites. Since small websites come and go like fruit flies, this list would be forever incomplete and out of date, just like people.

I’ve just started fooling around with watercolor. Here’s my second watercolor painting ever! For the first, and some ink and pencil drawings, click the link Continue reading ‘Art Update November 08’ »

Due to overwhelming demand (okay, one person asked - but he asked twice!), here are some more of my recent drawings. Click the link to see the rest. Continue reading ‘More Art’ »

I was thinking about Hawking radiation the other day (briefly, that’s when a particle-antiparticle pair spontaneously emerges from the vacuum not far from the event horizon of a black hole. Before the particles can recombine, one gets sucked down into the black hole as the other flies away - hence, the appearance of radiation). I wondered, could information be destroyed by this process if it involved a pair of quantum-entangled particles? (Briefly, entangled particles are connected in some as-yet-unclear way so that when you measure some property of one particle, the other one takes on a corresponding state - seemingly instantly, no matter how far apart the particles are. This is weird, but it’s been experimentally verified endless times).

Here’s the experiment. Suppose I make a pair of entangled photons in the lab (that’s pretty easy to do). Let’s call the photons A and B. I’ll keep A in a bottle (speaking abstractly, of course) and I’ll send B into a black hole, where it disappears behind the event horizon. Are the particles still entangled? When B disappears behind the event horizon, is any information lost or destroyed? Is there a net change in the information in the universe? If I now measure some entangled property of photon A (polarization, for instance), will B take on the complementary state, even though it’s behind an event horizon? Pushing the question, suppose a friend travels into the black hole first (abstractly speaking, again) and measures the polarization of photon B when it arrives. Would A, back out here in my lab, then take on the complementary state? If so, would that mean information was flowing out of the event horizon and into my lab?

I’m a writer, Jim, not a physicist. I do know that we can’t use entanglement all by itself to communicate, which implies it doesn’t contain information, but we can use entanglement for real-world procedures like quantum cryptography. So I wonder if the entangled particles remain entangled even when their communications channel is removed.

Because I’m unique and an individual, I’m playing an unknown little video game called Grand Theft Auto IV. I’ve observed two things that I haven’t seen discussed in the bazillion of discussions of the game, but I think they’re applicable to many other games. In both cases, the game has become more “real” with the result that it’s less fun.

GTA IV take place in a city that is dense and “realistic”: every street is different, every building has its own texture. The result is that landmarks don’t stand out nearly as well as they did in previous GTA installments, simply because there’s so much stuff out there competing for your attention. The result is that automotive navigation is harder (and you spend a lot of time driving!).

The game also requires you to maintain in-game “friendships” between your character and other in-game characters. The friendships pay off in terms of gameplay, but the game tries to be “realistic” by tracking how much time you spend together doing activities each friend likes: shooting pool, getting drunk, etc. Doing these activities requires a lot of time (my time, that is) and lots of driving, but I don’t get much pleasure from the mini-games they chose to implement (even the ones I originally liked were boring the 20th time!).

In both of these instances, making the game more “real” has made it less fun. In this context, more is less.

I’ve been drawing with pigment markers recently (these are fine-point art markers that come in a variety of thicknesses). It’s fun but risky because I’ve imposed some arbitrary rules on myself: I don’t make a pencil sketch first, and I can’t erase anything. It’s a challenging way to work, but I enjoy it. I’m sure I’ll go back to something that lets me work with tones again before too long, but this is fun for now. Here are a couple of examples.

I was updating some software on my PC. First I got a window saying “Extracting Installer…” and then it said “Installing Extractor…”