Family
The baby was due 8 days ago, so I'm a little distracted at the moment. The doctor will be inducing Anne tomorrow morning, so I should be a father again tomorrow. I wonder how much sleep I'll get tonight?

Grammar
I'm doing some interesting things with grammar parsing at work at the moment. I've looked at a few open source grammar parsers, but the one that I like the most is Link Grammar. It doesn't parse sentences into structural elements like other parsers, but instead looks for how individual words can link together. I've been pleasantly surprised at how easy it has been to use. I'm especially impressed at how easy it has been to modify the grammar to generally handle unusual situations.

I don't know how much I should be discussing it here. Just thought I'd mention it all the same.

Objective C and Cocoa
I'm still enjoying this, but it hasn't all been plain sailing.

The other night I had a problem with some simple code that would not work. It kept failing when I tried to call a method (or "send a message" in Objective C parlance, since it's not really a method call). According to the debugger, it could not find the method I was looking for. This object was being deserialized from the NIB file, so I tried instantiating a new instance of the object, and sending the message to that object instead. It still didn't work.

Trying to see everything running, I put a printf into the init method of the object. At this point I discovered that init was not being run when I instantiated the object the second time:

MyClass obj = [[MyClass alloc] init];

However, the init method was running just fine when the object came out of the NIB.

Out of frustration, I re-built a lot of this project (maybe something strange was happening in the NIB, and I have no way to work on that directly - only through limited APIs and the Interface Builder application). While doing this I discovered that I could crash the application during the init method on my class. If I have the line:

CGPoint size = CGPointMake(300.0, 400.0);

then I could guarantee a bus error when returning from init.

So this looks like I've smashed the stack somehow, though I can't see what I've done. I'm guessing that it has something to do with some element of Objective C message passing that I don't yet understand.

I fixed the problem by moving the set up code into another method, and not having an init in my class. It works, but I'd love to learn what the problem is.

In the meantime, this may have pointed me to another problem I've been having. DavidM still runs OS X v10.3 (Panther), rather than v10.4 (Tiger). I tried sending him a copy of one of my programs, but it crashes mysteriously. It's even more mysterious, as 3 other people running v10.4 all found that it worked fine. Now that I've seen the problems with init I've started wondering if this could have been the cause. To complicate matters, the program in question is multithreaded, so it's possible that there's a race between the new thread and init method, and it only shows up on v10.3. I've re-arranged the initialization in this code, so I'm keen to see how it works. (Unfortunately, I haven't seen David online since I made this change).

Compiler Hissy Fits
On other occasions I've had problems where the compiler wouldn't allow me to call init directly on a newly allocated object. So instead of the following (copied directly from the Apple Mutithreading documentation):

  NSAutoreleasePool* pool = [[NSAutoreleasePool alloc] init];

I was forced to split it up:

  NSAutoreleasePool* pool = [NSAutoreleasePool alloc];
  [pool init];

Now according to my understanding of Objective C, these are equivalent, so I don't understand why the first was failing.

However, I'm still learning. I'm even taking the time to read language documents now (taking the slow and methodical approach that I eschewed last week). Hopefully this extra insight will help.

Books
A couple of days ago I read the Slashdot review on Java Puzzles. I obviously have lots of spare time at the moment, so I decided to get a copy. I haven't been buying many technical books lately, as everything I want is usually online (and more up to date), but I love getting new books, so I thought I'd treat myself.

So far it's been a light read. I've only made it through the first couple of chapters, but I'm mostly getting the puzzles out. At least it's showing me that I do seem to understand the language spec reasonably well. However, I've picked it up from usage, experimentation, and knowledge of other language implementations. I really ought to read the spec one day! :-) (I keep meaning to. Maybe this will be my incentive?)