Cloud computing

This weekend I was reading an article on cloud computing . And to be honest I'm very skeptical on the success of this new paradigma.

The idea behind cloud computing is that you have mega-datacenters out of which you run applications (f.e. Google Apps), so lowering the cost for companies (the cost of owning an own IT department).

Too me this is again some marketing hype (computer vendors trying to sell services).

I can agree that some basic services  can be offered over the net, but complex applications ? No never.

Basic services like storage over the Net seems logical too me (I use box.net for example). But apart from that ? Will you use Amazon SimpleDB for example ?

Amazon SimpleDB offers you a (simple) database over the Internet, but what is the use of it ? Everybody knows that making a database application performant enough is already a big challenge in a total controlled environment. How can you ever make it performant when your database is somewhere sitting on a remote server and you only have access to it over the Internet (and behind a firewall)?

In my company for example  we have a 200GigaBit connection to our private datacenter (over a private network) and still we had to invest in very expensive routers with caching.

And not to mention  the next level of Cloud computing : applications over the Internet.

If you have ever used Google Apps and Google Docs for example, then you understand that those applications are miles (not to say lightyears) away from suites like NeoOffice or MSOffice.

And of course don't forget things like security, privacy, reliability etc.

Think for yourself : would you put all your company (or private ) data on to the servers of Amazon,Google, IBM or Microsoft ?

Tetris and Maze

I'm currently busy extending the Tetris application with some visual's, more features like highscores, levels etc.

I come back to that because I found some nice things with the NSImage class.

I'm also busy with a Maze application, the purpose will be to escape a maze using the SMS (so this will be for Macbook  and Powerbook only).

Cool IPhone application

 This has nothing todo with objective-c or Cocoa , but this is a damned cool IPhone application.

This application  runs an OS 9 Mac Emulator on your iPhone. So now you can have those good old days Mac application back on the IPhone (MacPaint here we come ).

This emulator is based on MiniVMac.

I don't known if its usefull but it shows at least the capabilities of the IPhone.

Note: the only caveat there is , is that you need a Mac Plus ROM image, and where on earth do you get that ?

Sudden Motion Sensor

I just found out the class library SMSLib, with this library one can access the accelerometer inside your Macbook or Powerbook.

I'm just looking now how to use this library and to make some wrapper classes around it (maybe adding some notifications etc).

Its very exciting...

IBAction and IBOutlet : what is this ?

During my programming efforts with XCode and Interface Builder , I never stood still what the meaning was of IBAction and IBOutlet.

I known that the identify an action or a field , but what are they ?

They are not classes or structs thats for sure.

But if you dig hard enough in the documentation of Apple, then you find out that they are nothing more than AppKit constants (and macro).

And IBAction is  just another name for void, they are used as syntax sugar for XCode and Interfacebuilder so that XCode&InterfaceBuilder can interpret the variables and methods correctly.

And IBOutlet is an empty macro.

You can find them in NSNibDeclarations.h

Conclusion: don't search for anything fancy, they are just void....