Allow me to present Jorge Garcia’s long-lost (creepy) twin, Joe Nunez.

Jorge’s the one on the right.

Lately, I’ve been trying to avoid calling NSLog directly in my Cocoa applications. I generally use NSLog to trace an application without having to resort to using breakpoints and such. The problem with calling NSLog directly is that it doesn’t automatically give any indication of the current location in the application. I have written two preprocessor definitions that take care of this:

#define BBTrace NSLog(@"%s", __PRETTY_FUNCTION__);

#define BBTraceInfo(s,...) \
{ \
    NSString* info = BBInfoString(s, ##__VA_ARGS__); \
    NSLog(@"%s (%@)", __PRETTY_FUNCTION__, info); \
    [info release]; \
}

The implementation of BBInfoString is as follows:

NSString* BBInfoString(NSString* format, ...)
{
    va_list args;

    va_start(args, format);

    NSString* info =
        [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:format arguments:args];

    va_end(args);

    return info;
}

The basic usage is:

-(void)func
{
    BBTrace;

    if (isEnabled)
    {
        BBTraceInfo(@"enabled");
    }
}

The output is:

May 18 16:47:29 Machine App[72187]: -[SomeClass func]
May 18 16:47:29 Machine App[72187]: -[SomeClass func] (enabled)

These functions are available for download. Feel free to use them in your own applications.

Looks like John Gruber took a trip down to the Franklin Institute to visit the Star Wars exhibit. Whilst there, he produced what is probably the coolest Flickr set I have ever seen.

I’ve always appreciated that LOST does not have a title sequence. This afternoon I put together a sequence that illustrates how LOST would have ended up in the hands of someone like Aaron Spelling.

All of the footage is taken from the two hour pilot episode. The music is from Melrose Place. The video was made entirely in iMovie ‘08. The experience seesawed from effortless to frustrating. Here are some random thoughts:

• Scrubbing is incredible; certainly faster and smoother than QuickTime.
• There is an annoying bug that causes all of the thumbnails to intermittently disappear from the Project browser. I was able to get them back again by randomly adjusting the frames per thumbnail slider.
• I can’t for the life of me understand why iMovie doesn’t allow for manual placement of text.

All in all though, this whole project took about two and half hours to complete, so that’s saying something.

There is a Wikipedia article dedicated to Uncle Henry, a character from The Wizard of Oz. I didn’t read the whole article - I got stuck after the third sentence. The sentence reads:

Uncle Henry is also a term used in business to describe the fallout when cross-functional synergies disrupt a core value proposition through N number of market anomalies precipitated by a consumer paradigm shift.

It’s not a joke. It does, however, appeal to my sense of humor. If you were playing Buzzword Bingo, that sentence would most certainly turn you into a winner.

Matt Gemmell recently posted a review of Sebastiaan de With’s intriguing Icon Resource - a collection of video tutorials covering icon design. Matt’s review does well to address the price tag:

Given the quality and quantity of material on offer, including fully layered original Photoshop PSD files for each major stage, the € 95 price tag seems like the bargain of the century.

My Tomatometer iPhone Web App made a brief appearance at the iPhone SDK event:

Yeah, I know, that was more than a month ago and you’ve probably already seen it on my Flickr.

Last month I was contracted to develop some widgets for I Can Has Cheezburger. Altogether, I developed 4 widgets:

• OS X Dashboard Widget
• Yahoo Widget
• Vista Gadget
• iGoogle Gadget

With each widget you can view the latest Lolcat, browse the archive of Lolcats, comment on a Lolcat and email a link to a friend. The OS X and Vista versions also allow you to vote on the Lolcat.

The widgets can be downloaded directly from I Can Has Cheezburger.

A little while ago now, Jess flew to Sydney to visit the Google offices. Just prior to heading home again, she went on a trek for obscure and ridiculous mementos. One of her more amusing selections was a B-grade horror flick from the bargain bin of a DVD store: Darkhunters. Needless to say, it was awful. In a good way.

Certainly the most interesting (and short lived) character in the film was this guy, Mr. Barlow. He was a Darkhunter which pretty much means ghost bounty hunter. I’m think he was dead, it wasn’t really clear. The basic premise was that, sometimes, when people die, they get “trapped between realms”. That is, they get stuck on Earth as a ghost that only a few people can see. Souls are “valuable commodities” and so bounty hunters such as Mr. Barlow chase them down in an effort to collect some kind of afterlife-ian reward. This Mr. Barlow guy was creepy and intense - the only good thing this film had going for it. Too bad he was only on screen for about 15 minutes.

I’ve seen this film many times now. Darkhunters is an hilarious kind of bad. As opposed to a gruesome or frustrating bad. It’s also short enough to play for guests. You just have to be sure to skip through the long drawn out scenes of cats acting creepy in a forest. A real gem.

More recently, we’ve been watching the fourth season of Lost. Really enjoying it. Loving the new characters. Particularly this guy, Frank Lapidus:

Jess was the first to notice. Frank Lapidus and Mr. Barlow are both played by the same actor: Jeff Fahey. It was an astonishing and amusing revelation. This obscure little film, (with a cover that looks to have been printed with an Inkjet printer), features an actor who came to play a character on Lost. Admittedly, it was more likely his work on The Lawnmower Man than Darkhunters that brought him to the attention of the producers of Lost. Still. Hilarious.

Click through to Jeff’s big scene in Darkhunters. Things to look out for:

• The woman first says, “not much to tell” and later says, “it’s a long story”.
• The woman says “he was terrified by something”. As it happens, “he” was terrified by cats.
• She doesn’t appear too concerned by Mr. Barlow’s fingernails or eyes.
• Both characters are repulsed by the coffee.

And yes, the whole film is like this scene.

Saturdays=Youth is the new album from my what is probably my favorite band, M83. Pitchfork awarded the album 8.5/10:

On Before the Dawn Heals Us, M83 was all about the vertical push– layer after layer of synths and drums piled up in a vertiginous tower. But these new songs disperse in all directions: Producers Ewan Pearson and Ken Thomas spread the melodies and beats into a sound world of uncommon vibrancy and pristine clarity, mounted on a massive yet now more proportionate scale.

I’ve probably listened to the album around 15 times now. It’s absolutely fantastic. Highly recommended.