few days ago i was need to understand, when you run action, how detect if it is still running or just stopped..

so, i’ve read their documentation, but didn’t get how to do that according docs. So i’ve decided to make it through system scheduler, that is the same as NSTimer in core iphone objective c. We make our scheduler  run and then release it when animation is stopped.

for example, we have object which we need to rotate. how to find out, when the rotation circle is over?

yes, we need to use step function, which give us understanding if it is still running ‘1‘ or not ‘0‘

- (void)StartAnim:(BOOL)direction Duration:(int)dur {
     if (direction) {
      id rightRotation = [RotateBy actionWithDuration:dur  angle:360];
        [object runAction:rightRotation];
     } else {
      id leftRotation = [RotateBy actionWithDuration:dur  angle:-360];
        [object runAction:leftRotation];
     }
     [self schedule: @selector(update:) interval:0.5];
} 
 
- (void)update: (ccTime) time {
        if ([object step_:0.5] == 1) {
                [self start];
        } else if ([object step_:0.5] == 0) {
                [self stop];
                [self unschedule:@selector(update:)];
        }
} 
 
- (void)start {
        NSLog(@"start");
} 
 
- (void)stop {
        NSLog(@"stop");
}

inside i have:

Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz

Bus Speed 1.07 Ghz

RAM: 4 Gb DDR2 SDRAM 667 MHz

HDD: 500 Gb 7200 rpm

NVIDIA GeForce 9400M 256 Mb

amazing macbook! really enjoy to work on it (=

There’s plenty of articles about the shortage of skilled IT workers [1], and the difficulty experienced by companies in finding qualified software developers. The whining would be far more credible if the Want Ads didn’t have a silly, arbitrary qualification: a college degree.

There’s nothing wrong with a software developer getting a college degree in CompSci, especially when it accompanies an opportunity to learn useful skills. My problem is with hiring managers who think the degree an absolute necessity, and who exclude otherwise-brilliant candidates who didn’t spend four extra years in a classroom. If you never graduated from a university, you may discover that getting a programming job without a degree is like trying to get a Teamsters job without a union card. Which is, not to put too fine a point on it, really dumb.

Frankly, I have always found this attitude unfathomable. But I’m willing to be wrong (really) and to listen to the opposite viewpoint. So I asked for input about the reasons someone might require a college degree as part of their company policy. I hoped to be given an “Oh! Now I understand!” moment in which I whacked myself on the head. So much for that idea.

A strangely common explanation for requiring a college degree is that it demonstrates “commitment.” As a recruiter friend said, “One client described it to me as less about the education or the degree and much more, for them anyway, about the sense of commitment the person shows to starting and finishing something. They indicated that they saw the lack of degree in parallel to the lack of loyalty or dedication to the employer.” Or as someone else said, “It helps demonstrate that that person can set a goal and then achieve it. It also shows that the person had the vision to realize that four years spent now will probably pay off in the long run.”

Maybe, maybe you could get away with that attitude if the manager is trying to fill an entry level position, and expects the pool of candidates to be very young or have little experience. In such cases, the youngsters have had little time to “achieve” much of anything, so the ability to do an all-nighter in pursuit of a good grade is — arguably — an indication of seriousness.

But even then, it’s not really a measurement of commitment. It’s a measurement of the candidate’s parents’ ability to pay a college tuition. Yet, someone who dropped out of school because he could no longer afford it and had to earn a living might care just as desperately about the field. Requiring a college degree (in anything, not just CompSci) excludes the people who are really committed to learning programming skills, because they did it on their own time, or worked full-time days while they attended a Tech School at night. Becoming a programmer because you want to demonstrates resourcefulness and determination. Aren’t those equally important as “commitment”?

Another major problem with the “commitment” excuse is that its relevance fades over time. I might have been a drifter or impatient idealist at age 20 (and in fact I was: I dropped out of a poison ivy league university to Save the World). In the ensuing 30 years, I might possibly have learned something — ya think? Yet, if I apply for a “college degree required” position today, my résumé wouldn’t make it past the HR department. (Because, as we all know, HR departments exist to eliminate candidates, not to find them.) I’ve seen several programming jobs listed that specify “college degree or five years experience,” and I’m fine with that. But I also know a major innovator in programming languages who was told he couldn’t teach a class in the field he invented, because he never bothered to get a sheepskin.

So far, I’m assuming that a company demanding a degree insists you have one in Computer Science, but I’ve rarely see them specify what your major should be. As several people pointed out to me (and I agree wholeheartedly on this point), the best programmers often come from other disciplines. (IBM at least used to give a +1 to any candidate with a degree in music.) To the degree that college does teach you “how to think” (though I suspect it’s more likely to teach you how to drink), it’s more important for students to acquire the skill of learning quickly than to have college experience in programming a now-”legacy” language.

As one correspondent, John M, explained eloquently, “The drop-dead killer programmers you want on your team, as likely as not, were not CompSci or Software Engineering majors. They’re doing programming because they like to do programming. They’re intrinsically interested in communicating with the machine, and what they can get the machine to do. The college kids you interview are in Comp Sci or Software Engineering because they think they’ll earn big bucks. That’s why Joel Spolsky [2] insists that any job interview should include asking the candidate to write code. I’ve had Dean’s List students from major engineering schools who couldn’t solve a simple problem — and couldn’t be coached into figuring out what to do. I have a young man working for me now who majored in Music Composition who rolled his eyes at the problem and said, “You probably don’t want to do it that way—the new LINQ to XML tools make it easier….”

For fairness, let me cite a few of the more sensible responses I encountered:

for example, we have date in ‘1226357333′ format, how should we convert it on iphone?

answer is pretty simple

NSTimeInterval unixDate = 1226357333;
NSDate *date = [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSince1970:unixDate];

what we need is just place our magic number into NSTimerInterval and then convert it through dateWithTimeIntervalSince1970 function.

okay, the next thing is to calculate how much time did pass from one date to another

for example we have timestamp at 2008-11-11 00:48:53 +0200

and right now is 2009-03-20 12:31:08 +0200

how should we calculate the difference?

that is quite simple too

NSTimeInterval unixDate = 1226357333;
 
NSDate *date = [NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSince1970:unixDate];
NSDate *currentDate = [NSDate date];
 
NSTimeInterval difference = 
                      [currentDate timeIntervalSinceDate:date] / 86400;
NSLog(@"Days difference: %f", difference);

as you see, we’ve used date variable with converted unix stamp and currentDate variable.

then we’ve calculated the difference through timeIntervalSinceDate function

but here is a thing, timeIntervalSinceDate return seconds to us, so we need convert them to suitable format, you may divide difference at 60 - mins, 3600 - hours, 86400 - days etc.

• The project name changes for the third time in as many months.
• The development manager decides that it is better to write a completely separate version of the software for the U.K. rather than tointernationalize a single version.
• The requirements definition is begun four months after development started.
• The newly hired director of R&D proudly informs the board of directors that the project will be 99 percent completed six months ahead of schedule, and assures the board that the software can ship directly to clients without going through beta testing.
• You are a Web developer. You open the ZIP file with the HTML documents the client produced for the site scripts you need to integrate with the Web application. And you discover the client’s HTML documents are all Microsoft Word files, saved in HTML format.
• You realize the reason the company hired you as a consultant is to referee a dispute among two competing departments over which technical platform to use.
• The memo says you will develop a 64-bit application using a 16-bit platform.
• The developer doesn’t understand the spec document and continues to develop anyway. And the QA team doesn’t know how to test, but they “test” anyway.
• When you see the project budget, you realize that over half of it was spent on a Web designer to create a Photoshop mock-up of the home page—with no regard to whether that design is feasible. Or with any attention to the thousands of pages of content that will exist underneath that home page.
• The user or client requests new features instead of focusing on bug fixing and performance enhancements.
• You find a list of 16 software development best practices and realize that not a single one of them is being followed.
• You are asked to port your project from Windows to MS-DOS.
• The technical project manager asks you to compose the list of user requirements—without consulting any actual potential users.
• People started sending notes “to file” rather than to each other. The notes are alibis about why the sender has nothing to do with the upcoming (but unacknowledged) failure.
• Status reports are seen as insubordinate.
• The new CIO replaces all the people who have deep organizational knowledge with outsiders from his old firm.
• It is a big project and is named Project Iceberg. Or it’s the third time the company is trying to pull this off, and the project is code-named “Phoenix.” Somehow, you don’t believe this one canspring from the ashes.
• Even the customers who got the free version are pissed off.
• The manager of your mission-critical project (handling 80 percent of the company’s revenue) has three months exposure to the technology of choice, and is training four brand-new developers at once. The manager is given a three-month project deadline.
• You learn that management had to insist that the interface definitions be checked into version control after the first code freeze.
• They change the project manager and relocate the whole project from one city to another. (You consider yourself lucky that the cities are on the same continent.)
• The QA team is told, “We’ve only allocated three weeks for testing” (on a project that has lasted six months already). Or QA is told, “The date is fixed. We have to have all this functionality by that date.”
• The program manager decided to try Agile methodology “to save time.”
• In a previous era, pre-cell-phones and ubiquitous Internet access: You get screeching abuse from a new project manager hired three days ago in New York, after you return from three days locked in regional CIO meetings in Frankfurt. Why? Because you hadn’t responded to the e-mail messages she had sent (and which you didn’t get), and you hadn’t updated her “project dashboard” that you knew nothing about.
• Management decides to spend a million dollars on a $20,000 project. Then the managers start agreeing with computer company salespeople that the $1 million in software requires $2 million of hardware. Meanwhile, a secretary purchases an off-the-shelf PC and a shrink wrapped CD containing some new office automation packages. She implements the project during her lunch break. (Arguably, we should count this one as a success.)
• The lead developer tells you that maintaining a complete history of all database updates is a requirement for the application, but he hasn’t had time to (read: doesn’t know how to) design a data model for it yet. So he decides to go ahead and start with the Web front end and worry about it later. And this is the lead developer.
• The business line leader/project funder says, “Get creative.” This happens after management reduces the project headcount by 20 percent. And after the IT team pulls out the hardware that had been slated for recycling, saying it’s your project’s new hosting environment.

article link is http://www.cio.com/article/print/470103

the main thing was that they had a test task which consist of:

“Using baseball-reference.com write a program (in the language of your choice) that retrieves every major league team’s season record since 1900. Have your program output the data in a CSV format where each line is a team year of the following pattern “,,,”. Order of teams and years does not matter, but there should be no duplicates.

example:

Boston Red Sox,2008,95,67
Boston Red Sox,2007,96,66
… ”

i don’t know why i’ve decided to make it i’m not a fan of baseball.

but anyway i’ve made it and will show you how:

my first step was to go and analyze the site baseball-reference.com

after that, i’ve decided to use PHP with prepared parser class.

include("phpHTMLParser.php");
 
$content = file_get_contents("http://www.baseball-reference.com/postseason/");
 
$parser = new phpHTMLParser("$content");
 
$HTMLObject = $parser->parse_tags(array("A"));
 
$aTags = $HTMLObject->getTagsByName("A");
 
 
$file = fopen('baseball.csv','w');
fwrite($file,"");
fclose($file);
 
echo "
	<center>Download CSV file:<br/>
	<a href='baseball.csv'>download</a></center>
	<hr><br/>
";
 
foreach ($aTags as $a) {
   if ($a->href != "") {
 
	$url = $a->href;
	$title = $a->innerHTML;
 
	$out = substr($url,-10);
	$info = strpos($title,"(");
	$i = 1900;
 
	while ($i<2008) {
 
		$i++;
 
		$count = $i.".shtml";
 
		if ($out == $count && $info == true) {
 
 
			$team_pos = strpos($title, '(', 1);
 
			$def = strpos($title, '-');
			$w_count = $def - $team_pos - 1;
			$win_pos = substr($title,$team_pos+1,$w_count);
 
			$com = strpos($title, ',');
			$l_count = $com - $def - 1;
			$lose_pos = substr($title,$def+1,$l_count);
 
			$team = substr($title,0,$team_pos-1);
 
			$team = str_replace('*','',$team);
 
			echo $team . "," . $i . "," . $win_pos . "," . $lose_pos . "<br/>";
 
			$file = fopen('baseball.csv','a');
			$content = "$team,$i,$win_pos,$lose_pos\n";
			fwrite($file,$content);
 
		}
	}
 
   }
}
 
fclose($file);

so, as you see the code is simple stupid, just a loop with checking for their custom pattern

you may see example and download it for your needs at my workshop

they didn’t choose me and i can’t boast you with “A new MacBook Pro, a 30″ monitor, an iPhone and 5k $”

so, don’t know where is my bad, probably i should make everything much more simplier with few regex lines.

or they didn’t choose me cas i’m from Ukraine not from united states

however, i like to do some interesting tasks at my free time when i have it (=

i’m open to hear some critics and suggestions, but keep in mind that it was a task for 10-15 minutes

i’ve made some search trough web and find out, that XPWN is already ok with it.

So, how did i do that (my steps):

• download the 2.1 firmware (2g - 3g)
• install itunes v8 (quite big repository of a different itunes versions)
  
• Update the iphone with itunes
• Download quickpwn with the correct 2.1 bundle inside it
• Run quickpwn, select everything you want: Cydia, Installer, Custom logo, be careful with steps
• Download Total Commander & T-Pot addon
• Download MobileInstallation patch (MIP)
  
• Use Commander to install MIP to /System/Library/PrivateFrameWorks/MobileInstallation.framework
• Delete /private/var/mobile/Library/Caches/com.apple.mobile.installation.plist

Reboot your iPhone and you are done! enjoy it

thanks xpwn, i’ve tested their way of jailbreaking, everything is working without any problems.

what i may say about google gathering, it was amazing - great people, interesting reports, outstanding place.

So, what did they tell us:

• Geo Services
• Open Social
• Gears
• Open Web
• App engine
• Chrome
• Google Data APIs
• Visualization API
• YouTube API
• Google Web Toolkit
• Android

i really enjoy reports about GWT, App Engine, Gears & Open Social.

have met some interesting people from Google, there was Chris Chabot and his technology was OpenSocial i really enjoy to speak to him, excellent pro with great sense of humour. One more person from OpenSocial was Chewy Trewhella, he has helped me with some of my questions and give me bright understanding of OS principles.

Brad Neuberg taught us about Gears technology, what i may say, he is a true winner of a kick-ass award. His report was so excellent and completely comprehensible, so there were almost no “stupid” questions regarding Gears just clarifications about technology. Blobs are rulezzz

Next thing was GWT (Google Web Toolkit) - Thomas Steiner was a rapporteur on it. Thomas was quite clear and interesting at his report, he gave us app example (priwet MocKBa) and show the code. Even despite a lil mess with eclipse he was great with his report! Chris and me had a bet regarding one of Thomas apps. The bet title was “Will the app have an error if would have empty field” as i told Chris, there was no exception handling at code, and there might be some problem but he told me that it is not true, it should be handled by some magic So when the lection was finished, we’ve come to Thomas and see small error which was caused by empty field, it was so small but anyway pleasure to me that i’ve found this

so, in conclusion i want to add, that it was great event with cool people and i have a strong will to visit it next year.

2Google: Keep going guys and you’ll achieve the highest TOP !

you may see some videos from GDD 2008 at youtube