Back Home Again

Nope, I haven't left Wisconsin in a while, though we will visit family next weekend. Home this time is the C programming language. I learned C a long time ago, moved to C++ in the early-mid 90's, and then to C# around 2001, and barely looked back. I always missed it somewhat, and occasionally did little projects of my own in C/C++, but C# has paid the bills for years.

Recently however I had the chance to dust off the trusty old C compiler for a project at work, a cross platform email MTA for Lotus Domino. It took a day or so to get back into the language, and quite frankly I am still struggling to quickly recall some of the C runtime functions. but it is coming back quickly. And the application that I am developing is nearly done, and very high quality to boot. I am pleased.

Last weekend we (the family) also bought a new Apple Mac Mini to replace our aging iMac G4 home computer. We sold a bunch of stuff on Craigslist to buy it, and are mostly pleased. If iPhoto 09' would quit taking a crap, all would be great. Apple quality is still very good, though their QA and past history of releasing nearly flawless software is just that, history. I do hope they get back to their old ways.

We copied all of our old pictures and other media from our server to the Mac for testing. All of our pictures and stuff are organized by the year, month and day they were taken. But, when copying the files over to the Mac, those original file time stamps were messed up. I could live it, but with my newly refound love of C, I decided to fix it.

About 800 lines of cross-platform bliss later, I have my first Macintosh program! It scans the media files and updates the dates to match. Nothing hard here, just a first for me. I still coded it on Windows and then ported (cleaned up really) the code to the Mac. First Mac application, first UNIX application in many years, and I am feeling good again. Now I am hunting for a good development environment on the Mac. By good I mean Visual Studio like, anyone? XCode still blows, though I guess I could get used to it.