Giant Robot Software

A few days ago, I submitted GRS’s current applications to Apple.com’s downloads page, and since then, downloads have skyrocketed! In two days alone, over 1,000 unique visitors downloaded an app from this website. We actually exceeded our uploading bandwidth! Because of this, we had to move to using Amazon’s S3 service, which works perfectly so far, and is much cheaper.

Firefox 2 and 3 both completely mess up for me when trying to use the S3 extension/plugin, but fortunately, there are other Mac-only apps which allow me to use the S3 service.

At first I tried Flow and it worked fine, with only a few choppy animations, but otherwise it was a very pleasant and intuitive experience. However, all files seemed to default to “public read (and possibly write)” and there was no way to change this or determine what kind of permissions were set on the files.

So, I found this Mac-only application which isn’t as pretty and fancy, but does the job and does it right. It allowed me to very specifically choose the file permissions as I uploaded them, and it is a small and lightweight app.

I’ve been told from a friend that MobileMe’s service allows for 200GB bandwidth, but for my purposes, that just seems overkill. Perhaps when the company really takes off, it could turn into a viable option, you never know.

It took a few days, but I was finally able to complete the website and get the completed apps online for downloading. Download my apps, and enjoy!

C++ was the first real language I learned, and because of this, I have a love/hate relationship with it. With the often illogical C++ standard library and an often external dependency on Boost, I’ve found it’s often just easier to write the same applications in Objective-C with the Foundation kit.

However, the gov’ment is on my bum about owning my own business but not having any products out yet, so I have to get a real job. I’ve heard rumor that a position might be opening up for teaching C++ at my local community college.

This means I’ll have to brush up on my std::classes and relearn bad practices, but the prospect of teaching programming in any way (excepting VB.NET) is just too enticing to pass up. So, I’ve applied, and hopefully I’ll be teaching there next year!