Nat!'s Web Journal

Hopefully next weekend, this page will become more active.

For that I am using Brainiacs all over the place. The Brainiac is a little class, that uses NSNotification to figure out suitable subclasses for handling some unspecified stuff. There is a priority scheme involved, there maybe user selection, and there is NSUserDefaults also somewhere in the mix.

One kind of Brainiac, the FilesystemGenericBraniac for example is used on files, to edit them or retrieve icons of a particular file. The MulleIDE supplies the FilesystemGenericBraniac which offloads the work to the operating system :). More specialized Brainiacs can be written that do more.

Another type of Brainiac are RenderBraniacs, that are used to write the internal representation into Make, JAM or Antfiles. MulleIDE will just supply a MakeRenderBrainiac. In the distant future it would be nice to also have an import Brainiac, that imports regular Makefile into the internal representation.

There will be very little subclassing for subclass writers in this environment, possibly none, except maybe for Brainiac classes.

Thank you.

Java ClownDuke's and fate's paths cross...

Anyway... For some head scratchin', use your new spanking IDE, finally with some intimations of thoughtful design, navigate to objc_msgSend and check out the first five instructions. If you figured out what it does, do you have an idea what it is good for and makes this worth it ?

An interesting new development in Quartz can be noticed by opening the Quartz Debug application in your Tiger Development Performance Tools application folder. Check out the option at the bottom of the main window, which is by default disabled. I think its easy to guess what this does.

The file is so small I am not quite sure, that the texture is embedded. If not please substitute it with the picture on the right side in Bitmap with File, the blue box.

As to the objc_msgSend, keep the ideas coming. Next week hopefully I will be able to present a result within the legal confines...

Next up, that objc_msgSend thing revealed, as much as possible under NDA.

Check out Pol-Online.net and have a look at Pixelshox Studio. This is a great application to create interactive visuals, which has been discontinued... Thanks to Stephane Sudre for this tip.

Because of the NDA requirement, I can't spell the solution out, but people with access to Tiger will be able to find this hidden feature. Also it's more fun this way. Here goes:

First look at Foundation, you should have a bash shell for the copy/pasting of this stuff:

otool -L /System/Library/Frameworks/Foundation.framework/Foundation | 
tail -3 | 
head -1 | 
awk '{ print $1 }' 

NEWFLAG=`strings /usr/lib/libobjc.dylib | 
grep fobjc | 
awk '{ print $6 }' | 
cut -d , -f 1`
echo "NEWFLAG=$NEWFLAG"

cat > x.m << EOF
#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>

main()
{
   NSObject   *p;

   printf( "retain: %lx (%lX %s)\n",      
         (long) [NSObject instanceMethodForSelector:@selector( retain)],      
         (long) @selector( retain),
         (long) @selector( retain));
   printf( "autorelease: %lx (%lX %s)\n", 
        (long) [NSObject instanceMethodForSelector:@selector( autorelease)], 
        (long) @selector( autorelease),
        (char *) @selector( autorelease));
   printf( "release: %lx (%lX %s)\n",     
        (long) [NSObject instanceMethodForSelector:@selector( release)],     
        (long)  @selector( release),
        (char *) @selector( release));
}
EOF

gcc -o x1 x.m -framework Foundation ; ./x1

gcc $NEWFLAG -g -o x2 x.m -framework Foundation ; ./x2

Finally to round it off, examine with gdb the instructions of interest:

cat > gdb.batch << EOF
set prompt 
fb objc_msgSend
run
x/3i \$pc+4
quit
EOF

( cat gdb.batch | gdb -q x2 | tail -3) 2> /dev/null