Tenseg

Senior Project Presentation and Finalization

Alex Celeste — Wed, 26 May 2010 00:03:12 +0000

Tenseg was born out of the beginning of my senior project at Avalon. Earlier today I presented my senior presentation at 2:30 pm and then finalized the senior project with my entire senior committee at 3:50 pm. I’ve put together a small page on the presentation that currently just contains the Senior Project Bio and the presentation slides but later on may include a video recording of the presentation. Later I had a meeting with my community experts from Project-Based Learning Systems to discuss the future of PF Touch. None of those details are final or public, but I can say that the future is looking quite bright for the central idea behind PF Touch. I hope you enjoy seeing my senior project presentation. In a way today can be considered the first birthday of Tenseg, even though its real first birthday is still a few months away.

Fact Triangles v1.3.1 Released

Alex Celeste — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 19:20:12 +0000

This update comes not a month after the major version 1.3 update. That is no surprise, there were a few bugs that I didn’t catch until a day after the release and a few lose ends that I needed more time to complete. This update fixes a few bugs related to first-ever launch situations and main window images. In addition I got the feedback window to memorize its location and added a Release Notes menu item to the Help menu. The primary lose end that has been tied up is the ability for the automatic updater to send an anonymous system profile along with update checks. I’ve made this data public for all to see if desired. You can take a look at the Fact Triangles Release Notes for a complete list of changes since version 1.3. Fact Triangles v1.3.1 is available both from the Fact Triangles Product Page and by selecting “Check for Updates…” in the Fact Triangles menu.

EmailSystemProfile

Alex Celeste — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 23:36:56 +0000

Since releasing the Fact Triangles v1.3 update I’ve been hard at work on some major improvements to utilizing extra features of the updater Fact Triangles uses as well as other bug fixes. The main improvement has to do with users being able to submit anonymous system profile information to us while checking for updates. One of the evenings I was talking with Eric about these he gave me the idea to write a script that ran at boot to email off a full system profile. As some may know, like me, from experience, the times you truly need a system profile are when your Mac is inaccessible. So a few days ago I wrote precisely that script, and have now made it available to anyone here. After setup you can easily forget that this script is in place until you find yourself in need of the system profile it outputs, at which time you can know you have a system profile stored safely and accessible to you.

Fact Triangles v1.3 Released

Alex Celeste — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 23:19:52 +0000

It has been a few months since Fact Triangles was last updated back in October purely to change its identifier to the scheme we use here at Tenseg. Before that the v1.1 release last May was the last significant update, and that was before Fact Triangles was under the umbrella of Tenseg. This v1.3 release has a long list of changes, some involve completing the migration to Tenseg mentions in the interface, some are the merging of menu items, some include really using user defaults, and yet others are the fixing of long-standing bugs. You can take a look at the Fact Triangles Release Notes for a complete list of changes. Aside from the visible changes the v1.3 update represents a complete refactoring of the source code. Since the initial release of Fact Triangles back in 2007 it was an old project that was originally built in 10.1 or 10.2. In the process of fixing some long-standing bugs (I couldn’t even use the Xcode debugger properly with the old project) I created a brand new project and copy-and-pasted the code into the new project. Thus leaving in the dust Eric’s old single-class application in favor of a proper application delegate and window controllers. The MVC model still isn’t fully there, but in a year or so I plan on building an iPhone version of Fact Triangles (likely to be named FT Touch) so once that is on the App Store I’ll bring the models used in it back to the Mac version for a v2.0 major update. A side effect of this new project is that the application requires Mac OS X 10.5 since my Mac has no 10.4 SDK installed, but it’s still a Universal binary, so I haven’t dropped PowerPC support altogether yet. Fact Triangles v1.3 is available both from the Fact Triangles Product Page and by selecting “Check for Updates…” in the Fact Triangles menu.

SubCalc Coin Flips

Eric Celeste — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:17:41 +0000

I noticed a minor flaw in the coin-flipping code of SubCalc today. In the process of cleaning this up I created a page that explains coin flips in SubCalc. What we do is actually more akin to drawing straws than flipping a coin, but since coins have traditionally been used for this sort of things in caucuses and conventions around Minnesota, that’s the terminology you will find in SubCalc. The update with the minor bug fix (v.1.0.1 of SubCalc) will go to the App Store today, we hope it gets published quickly, though most users won’t even notice there is anything wrong with v.1.0 anyway.

SubCalc at the App Store

Eric Celeste — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 03:11:26 +0000

Apple took only three days to review the app Alex and I submitted on 1/25. Today SubCalc became a free app on the App Store.

SubCalc is an app to help convenors of precinct caucuses and conventions in Minnesota. The Minnesota Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) party uses a wonderful, but bit arcane, “walking subcaucus” process that is simple enough to do, but rather difficult to tabulate.

This app calculates the number of delegates each subcaucus gets when you enter the total number of delegates your precinct or convention is allowed and how many people are in each subcaucus. The rules it follows appeared on page 4 of the DFL 2010-2011 Official Call, including the proper treatment of remainders. It makes the math involved in a walking subcaucus disappear.

The app could be used to facilitate a “walking subcaucus” or “proportional representation” system for any group.

If you don’t have an iPhone, try the “web app” version of this subcaucus calculator for at http://www.sd64dfl.org/sub/. But if you do have an iPhone or iPod Touch (or iPad!) please give SubCalc a spin!

A Note About the Clang Static Analyzer

Alex Celeste — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:51:05 +0000

One of the key new features in the latest release of Xcode (v. 3.2.1) is the built-in Clang Static Analyzer. For those that don’t know, the Clang Static Analyzer has been around for some time as an extra tool developers can install. The extra layer it provides on top of the normal errors and warnings of Xcode is that it will look at your code, without executing it, and go down every possible path to find memory leaks or any other kind of logic error that may be in your code and easily missed when reading the code as a human. In my personal opinion every developer should regularly use the Clang Static Analyzer, which is why it was so nice when Apple included it as part of Xcode a little while back (I’d used the standalone version of the analyzer once). Only today did I finally get the built-in analyzer to properly function.

It took me so long to figure it out that I thought I should explain it here: With the default settings the “Build and Analyze” menu item in the “Build” menu won’t work (I kept trying this for weeks with no results). Nor will setting the active compiler in project settings to Clang LLVM 1.0 and using the menu item. Instead you can keep the compiler at the default GCC 4.2 and just check the Run Static Analyzer checkbox in project settings. Now each time you build your code (no need to build and go) it will be analyzed and the output embedded in the source code windows the same way that the errors and warnings are.

A LaunchDaemon to Start Internet Sharing at Boot

Alex Celeste — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:42:42 +0000

This afternoon I was looking up any possible ways to automatically start OS X’s Internet Sharing at boot. Given that the feature isn’t designed to be used as a permanent (in this case) airport base station Apple doesn’t provide any method of keeping the service gong across reboots. That is something that many people have given hints as to how to accomplish. Most are in editing system configuration files, and at least one is in creating a StartupItem. Now, the average Mac user doesn’t want to play around with hidden files used by Mac OS X, and StartupItems have been made obsolete by the new (as of 10.4 and first used extensively in 10.5) launchd process that runs all specially formatted plist documents in the root and system library subfolders /LaunchAgents and /LaunchDaemons. So, this afternoon I wrote my own LaunchDaemon plist to accomplish this task and have made it publicly available here on the Tenseg website. This new method of accomplishing the task that many of hinted at uses the new launchd versus the obsolete StartupItems. If you’ve been looking for a way of accomplishing this then look no further and please download this piece of software.

Apple Has Approved Us!

Alex Celeste — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:22:04 +0000

As of this afternoon Apple has approved our application to the iPhone Developers Program. We can now access the Program Portal and do on-device development. There is at least one iPhone application idea in the works and more should come in the future. I’ll talk about that one idea later on, but all I can say for now is that if we decide to publish it on the App Store then it will become available in April or May of 2010.

Tenseg is Born

Alex Celeste — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:57:59 +0000

Welcome. This site is still deeply under construction, but will be the website for Tenseg, a development company run by Alexander Celeste and Eric Celeste. What will we be developing and publishing to the world on this site? Both Mac and iPhone applications. Also Mac widgets and other plugins. In the next couple of weeks this site should get spruced up quite a bit.