After the announcement earlier this year that C4 was cancelled, I had a hard time getting too excited about conferences. My feelings about Apple’s WWDC are ambivalent: it’s an impressive production and a great opportunity to meet up with dozens or hundreds of colleagues, but it’s expensive and simply lacks the heart of smaller conferences. I go to WWDC every year with some amount of excitement, but mostly as a point of professional obligation. Attending smaller get-togethers like C4, on the other hand, is pure indulgence.

While I don’t think C4 can be replaced, there are other conferences of a similar scale that can help to fill the void. This Fall offers a full calendar of options for folks who are looking for an opportunity to socialize with peers and learn a few new tricks of the trade:

VTM iPhone Developer’s Conference: October 16-17, Philadelphia, PA.
Voices That Matter has been on a run with iPhone-targeted conferences, putting on a show every 6 months or so at different locations around the country. I spoke at the Boston event a year or so ago, and had a great time.

I am attending the Philadelphia event as a speaker alumni guest, and they have also passed along a discount code to share with you: PHBLOGS. If you use this code before September 10th, it combines with early bird pricing for a total savings of $300.

MacTech Conference: November 3-5, Los Angeles, CA.
For all you hardcore Mac and IT nerds who have had enough of the iPhone-only conferences, this is the place for you. This is the inaugural event and seems to have come at least in part as a reaction to Apple’s substantial omission of Mac and IT content from the WWDC event this year.

I’m speaking at this conference and although I won’t say exactly what my topic is, it just might set me up for a world class showdown with my illustrious friend Wil Shipley, who is also scheduled to appear.

360 iDev: November 7-10, Austin, TX.
Hot on the heels of MacTech, 360 iDev is another iPhone-oriented conference that has been skipping around the country. The Austin, TX location is a big draw for me, but I think with so much other activity and the speaking gig just prior in Los Angeles, I will have to sit this one out.

Apple Developer Tech Talks: November-December? Worldwide.
If you haven’t been lucky enough to live near enough and apply quickly enough for these stellar events, you’ve missed out. For the past several years Apple has sent some of its best communicators to put on what amounts to a micro-WWDC: a day of intensive sessions on the latest and greatest Apple technologies.

I attended last year’s New York event and wrote up the experience for TUAW. Assuming Apple puts this tour on again this year, and I’m eligible to attend, I’ll be scampering to sign up. You should, too!

What else is going on in the Apple-sphere this Fall? If I am overlooking something big, please share with us in the comments below. I’ll update the post later with a more “definitive” list of options to choose from.

Brent Simmons makes the case for power of software as a more admirable quality than flexibility:

It may go against the grain a little bit, but I’ll say it: I’m incredibly excited for the future of Mac software. I don’t expect we’ll make software that looks and feels like iOS apps (we shouldn’t), but I do expect we’ll learn from iOS apps how power is the real goal, and that flexibility is just a tool to use exceedingly sparingly, only when it substantially increases power.

I like, no … I LOVE the idea of learning from iOS apps, in order to build superb Mac apps.

As many of you know, I don’t believe the Mac is dead, and it should go without saying I don’t believe iPhone or iPad is dead.

We’re on the brink of an Apple-dominated consumer-electronics era, and we’re in charge of making the software good.

On a whim today I tried to figure out what the oldest pages are on the internet that mention the names of Google’s founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. In particular, I wanted to find out what information Google’s founders left on the internet before they had the notion to index it all.

This pursuit was of course assisted by Google itself. It has a nifty advanced search feature where you can specify a date range for the results. Unfortunately the algorithm for assigning dates to pages seems really buggy, and you end up with a lot of false positives for the date range you specify. For example, Google was being talked about in 1973?

I was able to find some interesting newsgroup postings from Sergey in 1994. On August 18, 1994, he sought advice about booking air travel from San Francisco to Baltimore. In 2010, this conversation would almost certainly not happen, as any number of powerful airfare search engines crunch the numbers and compare rates across carriers, dates, and airports.

But even more interesting to me is a math question posed in 1994 about the Karhunen-Loeve theorem:

Hi,

I ran across a reference to a Karhunen-Loeve transform in a paper I was reading and from the brief mention it seems that it is relevant to my research.  However, there is no pointer to where I could find more information.

Could someone let me know what a good reference for the Karhunen-Loeve transform would be?

thanx
–sergey

Today you just type “Karhunen-Loeve” into Google to get the answer.

I finally updated to Xcode 3.2.3. I was a little late because I had other priorities, but I wanted to get my iPhone projects building and installing onto my iPhone OS 4.0 devices, so I decided to download and install the latest SDK.

Unfortunately, this seemingly minor update presented a major failure in my debug builds, which I’m adventurously compiling using the LLVM clang compiler. They built fine with Xcode 3.2.2, but starting in 3.2.3, I got a linkage failure, tracing back to the popular open source RegExKitLite:

Undefined symbols:
  "___gxx_personality_v0", referenced from:
      _rkl_debugCacheSpinLock in RegexKitLite.o
      ...
  "__ZSt9terminatev", referenced from:
      +[NSString(RegexKitLiteAdditions) clearStringCache]
      in RegexKitLite.o

What? Those symbols smack of C++, but there isn’t any C++ code in my project. At least, I don’t think there is. RegExKitLite is so famously advanced in its designed, I couldn’t easily tell you whether there was stuff in there intended as C++ or not. On a whim, I tried to switch the file type to C++ to see if that made clang any happier. No, it screamed bloody murder. It agrees with me, RegExKitLite is not C++ code.

So why the link errors? I examined the compile line carefully for RegExKitLite and confirmed that it’s using clang in a manner that should only be generating plain C linkage:

/Developer/usr/bin/clang -x objective-c -arch x86_64 ...

But when I look at the resulting RegExKitLite.o with the “nm” command-line tool, it shows the culprits symbols have been listed as references in the binary object file:

% nm RegexKitLite.o | grep -e terminate\\\|personality
                 U __ZSt9terminatev
                 U ___gxx_personality_v0

Normally when I’m getting some kind of issue like this, I just type in the problematic symbols in to Google and usually find somebody else has found and solved the problem. No such luck this time. There are lots of false positives for the typical reason somebody runs into this link error: they are compiling legitimate C++ code but neglecting to link with the stdc++ library. But in our case, we are not compiling C++ code, but we’re ending up with C++ dependencies nonetheless.

I hopped on to the #clang IRC channel on irc.oftc.net, where a couple extremely helpful clang engineers (thanks to dgregor and rjmccall) helped talk me through the problem, and determine that it does seem to be a clang 1.5 bug. They confirmed that with their latest and greatest clang the bug seems to be fixed, but I was curious to confirm it myself, so I checked out and built the latest clang, too. Sure enough, all is well for future generations!

But what do we do now, stuck with the clang 1.5 that ships with Xcode? There is a crude workaround: simply link to stdc++. But yuck! All that C++ linkage dirtying up my pristine Objective-C project? Since I only use clang (for now) to build debug builds, I don’t have too much of a problem doing this. But if I was shipping these binaries I would be very hesitant to make that concession.

Radar #8230225: clang 1.5 forces linkage to C++ for non-C++ source file
(Open Radar Link)

The best we can do is report the issue to Apple and let them decide whether it’s worth their time to backport whatever fix in later clang is missing from clang 1.5. If you have other suggestions for how to work around the problem in the mean time, please do chime in with a comment below.

Update: The author of RegExKitLite kindly chimed in below with a pointer to the revision in the clang source repository that that fixes the issue. He also suggests a simple, and seemingly safe workaround, involving a slight tweak to the RegExKitLite source code.