Maker wannabe.

I read Dilbert comics every day. Lately, it has been about a MBA guy coming to the Dilbert's office (of course, because of the economic crisis). It's funny and I can understand the allergy of people to MBA graduates, but if so, why have they exclusively possessed important positions in the US? Or... Maybe, MBA employers employ MBA employees. Isn't that right?

When I try to read pdf over hundred pages on iPhone, it takes too much memory and hung up. So I've been trying to save a pdf file as jpegs to read it on iPhone. It was not a straight forward, but finally I think I got the best way (for me). This is what I wanted to do. 1) select pdf file 2) create a new album on iPhoto whose name is same as pdf (without an extension .pdf) 3) extract each page as jpeg 4) push jpeg files into the new album The most difficult part was (2), getting new album name. I tried to do it in automator way, but finally I came to create name using outer script (in this case, python). Sorry the picture of UI is in Japanese, but they are 1. Select Finder item 2. Set variable (to variable 'filename') 3. Execute Shell Script 4. Set variable (to variable 'albumname') 5. Get variable ('filename') 6. Render pdf pages into images 7. Change Finder item name (to add sequential numbers to the file names) 8. Load files onto iPhoto(usinge variable ...

I am not sure if it is missing or I don't see right place, but when iPhone program throws exception, the debugger shows it is stopped by UNCAUGHT EXCEPTION, but what kind of exception was that. It has been long since I used visual studio on Windows, but I think it could do that. I can't help thinking Visual Studio on Win is better than Xcode on Mac, or is it just matter of experience?

According to this article(google translated) the three biggest Japanese book publishers (and Dai-Nippon insatsu, the biggest printing company) are trying to buy about 20% of BookOff, the the largest used book chain stores in Japan. This news sounds little bit odd if you know the Japanese book store system. Japanese book stores have the "reselling system"(I am not sure this translation is right. In Japanese, it's called Sai-Han-Sei), any book store, but Amazon, can send back left books and get paid without penalty, so book stores in Japan are actually not retailers but something like landowners. To protect this system, publishers have been very aggresive against used book stores, and what will happen if they get biggest used book chain is bought by them? Japanese book reselling system is a kind of cartel, and if the used book market is somehow involved in it, it's too bad.

I am trying to create an iPhone program, for the first time, and this is also my first time creating a program in Xcode, and one more thing, this is my first time to create a game with cocos-2d. So, you know, it is very confusing about everything. I followed this instruction(Whitepaper: Introduction to Cocos2d iPhone) to create a new project onece, and it worked OK. But it was necessary to use new feature on cocos-2d, so I downloaded source code by SVN. It was so annoying to create new project all over again, so I followed this instruction(Creating a new Target-cocos2d-iphone-discuss/Google Group) , and, Ooops! I got into a huge(?) mess. Whenenver I changed a project little bit(even its project name), debugger stops launching OR program crashes on the line [[Director sharedDirector] attachInWindow: window] with UNCAUGHT_EXCEPTION. I spent two annoying days to avoid this problem and I finally give up. My go-around is just create a sub folder inside the cocos-2d and follow the first di...

I heard that there are not many blogs from Japan in English, I am trying to start one. Hopefully, it will continue for a couple of years, or months, ... or days.