DigitalHobbit’s Legacy Blog

This blog, which used to be published at www.digitalhobbit.com and covered a mix of technology, software engineering, nerd stuff, and personal topics, is no longer actively maintained. It is preserved for posterity here at legacy.digitalhobbit.com.

You can now find my RPG-focused blog at www.digitalhobbit.com. You can also find my dormant music blog at music.digitalhobbit.com.

Note: Some posts might be temporarily broken or missing images and links. Since the blog was started in 2004, it went through multiple transitions (from WordPress to Jekyll to Hugo), and I need to update the remaining posts to the current system.

Anyone still reading this?

It’s been almost 5 years (!) since my last blog post. Initially, Twitter and Facebook took the place of blogging for me, but I’ve since given up on using Twitter as well. I’m considering posting the occasional article to my blog again. We’ll see… In the mean time, I’ve refreshed the Jekyll theme to something more aesthetically pleasing (I’m now using Type). In my defense, I did post a handful of times to my music blog....

My Music Blog

Earlier this year, I started playing with electronic music creation, mostly using Propellerhead Reason . There’s a lot left to learn, and I don’t have any masterpieces to show off yet, but it’s been a fun, creative outlet so far. I recently kicked off a music blog, where I’m planning to document my experience. Check it out and subscribe in case you’re curious.

My new iMac

I recently bought a new iMac to replace my aging (3.5+ years old) MacBook Pro, and I love it! Since I’ve been getting some questions about it (and I haven’t blogged in a while anyway), I figured I’d take this opportunity to write a quick blog post. It took me a while to figure out what kind of computer to get: I considered getting another MacBook Pro, but I already have one at work, so I didn’t really need another laptop....

Relaunching on Jekyll

Last weekend, I migrated my blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. Wordpress is a solid blog platform and has served me well for the past 7 years, but at this point I simply don’t need anything that sophisticated. The frequent security exploits have also become a bit of a liability, and in fact my blog was already hacked in the past. To be fair, the Wordpress development team tends to react quickly with security updates, but I simply don’t have the diligence to keep my Wordpress installation up to date all the time....

A Useful UITableView Cell Creation Pattern

Like many iPhone apps, the app I’m currently working on uses several table views. Most of these display actual lists of data, and some are used as a convenient layout mechanism for input fields, navigation, and other UI elements (similar to iPhone preference screens). UITableView and its associated classes like UITableViewCell, UITableViewDataSource, and UITableViewDelegate are very powerful, but they also require a fair amount of boilerplate code split across several methods....