Root Beer Research

Barq's root beer tastes better the colder it gets. Near freezing, it becomes more syrupy and fizzy...refreshing on a warm day, especially after some heavy-duty yard work. Looking at the ingredients however, it is sad to see HFCS (high-fructose corn syrup) and sodium benzoate. Time for a change. Further investigation online revealed a store appropriately named "The Root Beer Store". They carry over 100 brands of root beer, and although prices are a tad steep, we are seeking these four brands of root beer: Bulldog, Virgil's, Sprecher, and Capone. (...almost sounds like a law firm!) These selections are based on favorable reviews found on The Soda Jerks. Elsewhere, we discovered several good reviews of Vintage brand root beer which can now be found at Trader Joe's stores.

Update: Obtained the four aforementioned items from the Root Beer Store and wow, the Bulldog is amazing. Two additional recommended root beers to obtain and sample: Hank’s and So Duh! Rockin’. Plus, Centennial Root Beer from Brewbakers in Huntington Beach.

Objective-C and Code::Blocks

Tricky to get this combination operational. The wiki entry is helpful for configuration. Not finding any of the Objective-C libraries in the default installation, we located what might be the correct support files on the TDM site. But after adding these matched libraries, we ended up with compiler warnings and a segmentation fault during the first alloc, using the simple test code on the wiki page. Next thing to try was the troubleshooting suggestion of removing libobjc.dll.a ... but that resulted in a laundry list of "undefined reference to" ... precisely the message the wiki entry claims the removal will avoid!

Finally, what worked was removing the entire mingw installation from the CodeBlocks directory (just delete everything in the mingw directory, version 4.7.1) and install mingw using the installer referenced on the mingw website. During installation, set the install directory to the mingw directory under CodeBlocks and then select to install the C, C++, and Objective-C compilers. This resulted in a good installation of GCC 4.6.2, a warning-free compile, and a faultless run...yay!!! (Remember, you cannot do any Apple development with this configuration, so including foundation.h is not allowed. But you can learn and play with the fundamentals of the Objective-C language on the Windows platform in preparation for moving to a Mac for iOS or OSX app development.)