Not all the good things in life are free (Taken with instagram)
In October 2004 Mount St. Helens became active again. I went there to take a look and then this sign stopped me.
The most impressive was looking at the mountain thinking about the before and after photos of the 1980 eruption. That a mountain that big can blow up is mind boggling.
I will be presenting two introduction to iOS development sessions at the upcoming SoCal Code Camp this weekend (October 23rd & 24th at USC, Los Angeles). SoCal Code Camp is held a few times a year and admission is free.
My sessions are for people who are considering iOS (iPhone, iPod touch and iPad) development. In my sessions, I plan to answer all their questions. Questions like: What do you need? Is creating a complete app something for me? Which frameworks are available? Can I do it all by myself? What are the best resources? How complicated is the submission process actually? Should I try to mix this with Windows Phone 7 or Android development? How do I make money? And of course I introduce you to Xcode, Apple’s development environment and Objective-C. Complete descriptions of my sessions are here:
http://www.socalcodecamp.com/sessions.aspx?tag=iOS
My sessions are Saturday morning. If you plan to come, make sure to be there early, the number of available seats is less than the number of people that signed up for the iOS sessions. (You can probably stand or sit on the floor, I suppose. If not, I will do the sessions twice, just outside if I have too.) The complete schedule is packed with more than 100 sessions, all geek stuff. :) SoCal Code Camp is mostly focused on Microsoft stuff, but other topics are encouraged by the organizers. A complete list of the sessions is available on the site. And I always find it nice to meet other developers. It will be fun!
Paulo Coelho in a ‘20 second read’ about the process of writing. Reading that, it seems to me writing is a lot like creating great software.
Early in the morning the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis (CVN-74) is getting ready to dock in the San Diego harbor. The ship is 1,092 feet (333 meters) long and has a crew of 6,500 people.
The San Diego Padres do quite well this year but no one is sure yet if they will make it to the playoffs. And that while we are in the second half of September. Padres fans know the feeling all too well. At the moment this picture was taken the spectators were feeling better.
Photo taken in Petco Park, San Diego, California.
I took this picture inside Château de Chenonceau. The same French castle that is pictured on the cover of Cocoa Design Patterns. On the book cover the outside of this castle is shown, which is pretty impressive, especially because the bridge that spans the river Cher is part of the castle. The picture above is taken inside that bridge. The inside is still nice, but not nearly as impressive as the outside.
Something like that is true for most books on Cocoa/iOS/iPhone development. They look good on the outside, but a soon as you dive in, they are nice but nothing more. Cocoa Design Patterns is an exception to this rule, in my humble opinion this is one of the few books every iOS or Mac OS X developer should read. It is not a book for beginners, but will suit someone who has already quite some Cocoa experience.
by Erik M. Buck and Donald A. Yacktman
Published by Addison-Wesley Professional
ISBN-10: 0321535022
ISBN-13: 978-0321535023
Below are some more pictures of the Château de Chenonceau.
Close-up of a Sagauro. Makes excellent wallpaper. Sagauros are very big; some may live for more than 150 years.
Photo taken in Saguaro National Park, Tucson, Arizona.
As I wrote about this before I was one of the speakers at Ignite San Diego earlier this week. (Photos are here.) More people signed up to speak than there were slots available so part of the selection process was a vote through ‘uservoice’ (great site). Fortunately I was selected although the subject of my talk, iPhone Development, was not as hip as most of the other proposed subjects.
It did not go as I expected. I am quite comfortable with speaking in front of an audience but with an Ignite talk you only have five minutes accompanied by a 20-slide presentation that advances automatically. That made it nerve wrecking. I got enthusiastic reactions about my first Ignite talk but next time I will do some things different. Maybe I set the bar a little too high, but this is what I learned that night:
I have not visited Japan yet but this photo may make you think I did. It is actually taken in downtown San Diego. San Diego is home of a lot of US Navy stuff, foreign navy vessels visit the city on a regular basis.
