Stuff and Nonsense

Alan Turing withoubt any doubt was a hero. Like many during a time of war he applied his unique talents to the benefit of the nation then and now. There can be no doubt that The Few that Churchill spoke of could count Turing and his bletchley park cohorts among their number.
There can be no more doubt that the way he was treated after the war for his homosexuality was despicable; no right minded person could think otherwise. But the laws of the time were exactly that. They were of their time. They were the laws of a society that hadn’t itself grown up. In the fifties particularly, Science itself still considered homosexuality a mental affliction. The Hobson’s choice of prison or chemical castration from which Turing was forced to choose after conviction are abhorrent to most of us now and rightly so.

And so it was that when I came across a petition on the number 10 website to have the Prime Minister apologise for Turing’s treatment at the hands of the state that I very nearly added my support. But then I stopped. Why should today’s goverment apologise for unjust laws two generations ago? It’s not the first time and I’m sure it won’t be the last but come on, really? What’s the point? It’s not like the pm is contemporary with the legislation or the events. We’re not talking missing weapons of mass destruction and illegal wars in the lifetime of the current government!

I just don’t understand what it is about society today that a portion must lobby the goverment of the day to apologise for the wrongs of previous incumbents. After all, goverments are a little like companies. There are 60 million shareholders and every few years we get to elect a whole new board of directors. We give them powers to make decisions and laws and we, the society of the moment abide by those laws for the most part because our democracy ensures that the law works for most people most of the time.

If you really want an apology for fifty year old injustices I suggest you lobby not today’s government but your own grandparents, and their peers who were the very society who, collectively and very likely out of apathy rather than malice allowed bad laws to last even beyond their generation. To be fair, the focus of the multitide in post-war Britain was unlikely to be laws relating to homosexuality so even “apathy” may be a bit strong. But whatever the justification, it certainly is not something that today’s politicians should be expected to apologise for.

The government today can only be accountable for things enacted in its name during its lifetime. Stop looking for someone to blame and recognise the past when you see it.

I was having a mare with the “code signing: no provisioning profile found for app id com.yourname… etc.”

I’d followed all the guides, Googled myself half to death and everything, I mean EVERYTHING looked right.

My provisioning profile used a wildcard app id.

Eventually I decided that XCode may not be using the right profile even though it SAID it was and thats when I found this.

http://www.frogameleon.com/blog/iphone-sdk-codesign-error-a-valid-provisioning-profile-is-required-for-product-type-application-in-sdk-device-iphone-os-22

That post did indeed show that the profile was blank. This enabled me to get the right profile in use for the sample app I was working in. However, it still complained about the mismatch in the app id but this time the error message was a bit more helpful.

Although I never got this from any of the documentation, and even though I know the answer now, the videos and Apple’s documentation STILL doesn’t lead me to this conclusion, here’s what my problem finally was:

In my provisioning profile I’d used app id com.jobb.*

This has of course been prefixed with a weired id so it actually looked had an alphanumeric prefix before it along the lines of ABCDEF.com.jobb.*

Everything I read lead me to believe that my bundle id in the info plist for my app should be set to this.

Not the case though. The bundle name just needs to be com.jobble.appname

Although XCode has screwed up my project initially, fixing that lead me to this simple solution.

To test my new found oh-so-obvious knowledge I created a new app from scratch, set the bundle name to com.jobbl.testapp2 and built it straight to my phone without any problems.

So, a mere 6 months after I got my developer certificate I finally have the ability to deploy dev versions direct to the phone. Now I just have to go back to learning objective C and try to come up with some interesting App.

And, just as my friend Craig told me… the answer when I find it is so obvious and so sensible that I can scarcely believe I ever had the problem.

Perhaps this post will help someone. Tonight’s effort was three hours straight and there have been several nights spent on this problem. So, I shall retire to my bed bathed in the warm smugness of having finally figured out something that should never have needed figuring!