It's been a while since I used XCode, so I was a bit baffled when debugging recently when I couldn't find a way to view a wchar_t* based string.

Surely there must be a way?

As it turns out, there isn't a way to do this that's built in to XCode (amazing!), but XCode can be extended with plugins, and Apple provide a sample plugin that does what I wanted.

To save everyone else going through the same length process that I've just gone through, here's how you do it:

You can get the sample project from http://developer.apple.com/samplecode/WcharDataFormatter/.

Build it with XCode (I built the debug version), and copy the resulting wchardataformatter.bundle into "/Library/Application\ Support/Apple/Developer Tools/CustomDataViews/".

One pitfall to look out for - it appears that the bundle has to be built for the native architecture that you're running on. By default, the project is set up to build for ppc, so if you're on Intel you'll need to change this to i386.

Once you've installed the plugin and restarted Xcode, you should find that when viewing any wchar_t or wchar_t* string, the Summary column in the debugger contains the correct character/text.

I've just discovered something neat...

After executing the following command in the terminal:

defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXBuildSuccessSound /Users/sam/Music/Codewarrior\ Clunk.aiff

My XCode now plays the familiar CodeWarrior "metal stamp" sound when my build finishes! Of course, you'll need to replace the path with a sound file of your own. I used Audio Hijack Pro to extract the clunk sound from a Codewarrior, but possibly it's out there on the net somewhere.

I've had an interesting time over the last year at Sony, but recently I started to realise that it wasn't really going in the direction that I wanted, and so I started to look around for alternatives.

As it turned out, my old friends at Sports Interactive were on the look out for a programmer. Things have moved on a lot at SI in the last couple of years, and to cut a long story short, I decided that I was very interested in going back there - and so, that's what I'm going to do.

The decision was made a while ago, but I've been keeping quiet about it until I actually left Sony, which happened this Tuesday. So on Monday, I'll be starting back at SI towers.

They say that you should never go back... but then they say all sorts of stupid stuff, so what do they know...

;)

My Autolink module has now been updated to work with Drupal 4.7.

For the uninitiated, here’s an excerpt from the read me file:

The Autolink module saves users from having to manually enter links for commonly used URLs.

The module scans posts for a set of terms. Any term found is optionally replaced with some other text, and then automatically linked to its corresponding URL.

The module uses Drupal’s built in taxonomy feature, so you can organize your terms in a Drupal vocabulary. Autolink terms are represented with the taxonomy terms in the autolink vocabulary. The descriptions are used to provide the URL that the term should link to.

I’ve just upgraded this server to use the latest version of Drupal.

Please let me know if you notice any glitches!