#if DEBUG in Swift

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Sigh. The Swift team give an impeccable impression of a group of people who’ve never actually tried to use Swift. An incredibly basic compiler task is to provide code a way to distinguish between debug & release builds, in order that it can behave accordingly (e.g. change the default logging verbosity, change asserts from fatal to… Read more

EXIF metadata stores random gibberish for dates & times

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Warped clock face spiralling ever inwards

I hadn’t ’til yesterday realised that EXIF metadata doesn’t actually store dates & times correctly.  Whoever came up with the spec all those decades ago clearly didn’t know how to work with dates & times correctly.  This is immensely frustrating since now we have countless images taken with timestamps that are collectively gibberish. The problem is… Read more

Stupid Swift error message #a bajillion and one

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Input code: Push button.  Expect results (or at least bacon).  Get: Foo.swift:76:21: error: expected ‘,’ separator .day: { String($0 + 1) }, ^ , Foo.swift:76:21: error: expected expression in list of expressions .day: { String($0 + 1) }, ^ Foo.swift:76:21: error: expected ‘,’ separator .day: { String($0 + 1) }, ^ , Believe it or… Read more

macOS 10.12.2 appears to have brought with it some GPU issues

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I run Einstein@Home, using both CPU cores & my GPU.  Other than a few month period where Einstein@Home was issuing broken GPU work units, I’ve been successfully doing this for years, I think.  Longer than I can really remember, in any case. It appears, however, that 10.12.2 has introduced some serious issues impacting those GPU… Read more

Flinging poo in Swift

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Thanks to one of the genuine upsides of Swift, full Unicode support in the compiler itself, you can do: Finally you can express yourself honestly within your program: Or, if you prefer to be polite & British about it: You can go further, if you like, and have all manner of interesting things thrown about… Read more