Working computer in a multitasking, time restricted setting offen means to you need to be very aware of when it’s time to switch tasks. Maybe you need to catch the bus in fifteen minutes, or got to a meeting in an hour. Keeping close tabs on the time can often be very distracting from the task at hand, but at the same time you can’t afford to miss the bus or that meeting. A very simple tool which can really help in these situations, are timers. While there are a bunch of fancy (and complex) timers out there, I often find that the best timer for a I-need-to-catch-the-bus-in-fifteen-minutes situation is the simpliest one. After trying out a few, the best timer that I could find is Minutes. It’s elegantly simple and just the thing to remind you about catching that bus. Check it.

I’ve been quietly adding some more photographs to my account, so it was about time I made note of it on the blog.

Public Notice: New photographs are now online. And this one is my favourite:

I’ve been scratching the last few days over a GCC error that’s been popping up in a project which I have been porting from Visual Studio 2008 to Xcode 3.0. The cryptic error message from GCC (version: i686-apple-darwin9-gcc-4.0.1 ) is:

error: expected unqualified-id before ‘OTHER’ token

After debugging it for a while, I figured it might of been caused by some incorrectly set extended attributes on the source files, as these errors were coming from files with extended attributes. I cleaned out all the extended attributes (thanks to Diego Zamboni’s script), but the error still remained. In the end the only thing that worked was to delete the erroneous files, create a new file, and paste the code back in. This solution suggests that the files were corrupted and therefore needed to be re-created.