My motorcycle is back from the shop! So now I can get back to doing all sorts of things like take my baby out for a quick ride around town.

I kid, I kid… I would never let him ride without a helmet. Safety first!

A couple of my friends (one male, one female) were talking about profile pics for an online dating site they’re on. Apparently, the three “don’t”s for men are:

• don’t show your chest or abs if you’re over 30
• don’t hold a baby
• don’t pose in front of your car

Of course, this meant that I had to pose with my shirt open holding my baby in front of my car. Happy Valentine’s Day!

While my motorcycle was gone, one of my friends generously offered to let me use his truck for a while. It was almost the exact opposite from my motorcycle in almost every conceivable way except for one: they both didn’t have power steering.

Lack of power steering is, of course, unnecessary for a motorcycle. But for five thousand pounds of metal? Egads. It was like steering a tank with a Sit-N-Spin. I nearly clipped three cars just trying to make right turns. And then I had to park in our parking lot, which is challenging under the best of circumstances…

I decided to take the bus for the next few days.

If you’re coming to this page because you just bought a new iPhone on the Verizon network, welcome! Are you excited because you finally get a chance to buy iPhone apps? Well, I’m pretty excited because I finally get to sell to Verizon customers. Maybe we can work something out… Check out my apps!

(And for those of you new to this site, it’s just a random blog of stuff that I happen to be involved in. Sometimes it’s about iPhone apps, sometimes it’s about baby stuff, sometimes it’s about my on-again off-again motorcycle, … it’s kind of eclectic.)

I’m not a big football fan, but I did go to school in Pittsburgh and it just so happens that my sister-in-law’s family are into the Pittsburgh Steelers as well. They’re the ones that got the baby this really cute outfit. So we were rooting for Pittsburgh to win.

Actually, he is really into cheese, and apparently, the Green Bay Packers fans are called “Cheeseheads”, so I think his allegiance might have been split. In any case, the party was a lot of fun, even though I barely followed what was going on. Everything’s more fun with food and friends!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXWo3wqgQiU

What is it with babies and clapping? I have no idea. But for some reason, he gets a kick out of it. Actually, I think he’s into anything that makes noise. Fortunately, he’s not into super loud noises like banging pots or anything. At least, not yet…

According to my blog (boy, this thing sure is handy for recording minor events in my life), it’d been about four months since my last haircut. So it was time for another one.

No big deal right? Well, it turns out that while my 7 month old baby was fairly unfazed with Daddy getting a haircut … at 11 months, he freaked out.

What gives? I have no idea. But I do notice that he seems to be much more aware of who I am now. So maybe it was like Daddy walking into the room with a horrible facial disfigurement or something.

Like, maybe he’s thinking, “Where is that stuff that I used to grab with my baby fingers? That ropey thing that I would pull myself up with? That hair?!”

Now that the baby is a bit more independent, I’m finally getting a chance to do some iPhone programming. One of the first things I wanted to tackle was adding Retina Display support for the iPhone 4.

It turned out to be pretty straightforward (once I figured out where to do set the contentScale). First, you have to determine what device you’re running. I started by creating a type to store that information:

	typedef enum {
		DisplayTypeIPhone,
		DisplayTypeIPhoneRetina,
		DisplayTypeIPad,
	} DisplayType;
	
	DisplayType displayType;

Then I set it in applicationDidFinishLaunching like so:

	displayType = DisplayTypeIPhone;

	// check for iPad
	float systemVersion = [[UIDevice currentDevice].systemVersion floatValue];
	if (systemVersion >= 3.2)
		if (UI_USER_INTERFACE_IDIOM() == UIUserInterfaceIdiomPad)
			displayType = DisplayTypeIPad;

	// check for Retina Display
	if (systemVersion >= 4.0)
		if ([UIScreen mainScreen].scale == 2.0)
			displayType = DisplayTypeIPhoneRetina;

The final piece of the puzzle was to set contentScaleFactor to 2 for my OpenGL view. The trick is that you have to do it after the context gets created and before the view gets setup. This took me all day to figure out. But hopefully someone else will see this and be spared some of that pain. In my case, I put it in initGLES:

	if (displayType == DisplayTypeIPad) {
		// eventually do resolution dependent stuff here
	} else if (displayType == DisplayTypeIPhoneRetina) {
		self.contentScaleFactor = 2.0;
	} else {
	}

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCf4uNz9WtE

One of the best things about having a baby is how new everything is to him. The first time he saw a big dog? He was like, “Whoah, these things can get bigger than me?!”. This time, it started when my friend Amos decided to entertain him by spinning a potato like a top. The baby just about lost his mind. It was like the potato started levitating or something.

He started to calm down a bit by the time this video was taken, but you how exciting it is to him. Ah youth…

My friend Amos White is working on a book of haiku and needed a cover for it. One of the things he tried was putting the text from his book into wordl.net to generate a word cloud that created an image from all the words where each word’s size was proportional to its frequency in the text.

The only problem was that it was really hard to read the title and his name unless you made them really huge, which made the rest of the words hard to read. So I played around with some of the settings and then did some stuff in Photoshop to make it easier to see everything.

Anyways, it was fun to see the different images that came out of it. So if you’ve got a big block of text somewhere (like, say, a 50,000+ word novel that’s just out there for free on the web) plug it into wordle and see what comes out! (Also, note that you can adjust how many words appear by going to “Layout -> Maximum words…”.)