I’ve not been quite so active blogging this year due to a number of factors. A case in point: it wasn’t until December that I wrote about my holiday in July and a friends wedding in August!

This meant that the most popular articles were actually written in previous years:

1. Sophia Smith
2. Eight Best Computer Books
3. Installing Oracle 10g on CentOS4
4. Minolta Dual Scan II
5. iPhone Dev: Saving State

While I appreciate people visiting, I am continually surprised by the appeal of some of these. Oracle 10g and CentOS 4 are, in software terms, ancient! And the Dual Scan II is more than a decade old — I bought it with my iBook G3 in 2001!

The most read articles that were written this year were:

1. iOS Developer Program: from individual to company
2. Do Apple take 40% in the EU?
3. Programming is Hard
4. Why you need a crash reporter

Kind of surprising that they were all about iOS development.

And here are a few blogs that I liked writing but, it turns out, people didn’t enjoy reading…

• Dear Companies House. A cathartic rant elicited a response from the target
• Programming is Hard
• Your most important customers
• The Trouble with eBooks
• A new CEO for Yahoo?

• On this day in 1996, Apple acquired NeXT – Fifteen years ago today Apple effectively started its upward trajectory.
• Why big companies can’t change – "At the polar opposite position from big industrial companies sit startups, nearly every one of which begins with an effortless expression of why? Big companies ask What? then How? but almost never Why?"
• Christopher Hitchens, 1949-2011 – "I’m not going to say R.I.P. I don’t think Christopher Hitchens is at rest. I don’t think there is anything left of him to rest. I think he is dead. But tonight, I’ll be raising a glass of Scotch in his honor. The world is a better place because he was in it, and it is a sadder, less interesting place now that he’s not."

• C and Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie reported dead – It's a sad week for the IT industry.
• Alma telescope opens its eyes – Awesome. In the original sense of the word.
• Mercury’s Explosive Volcanic History – Both beautiful and fascinating.
• Apple’s iPod: ten years old – Is it really a decade since the first iPod?

• Gallery: Iron Man, Other Pop Icons Become My Little Pony Sculptures – My Little Pony has a dark side too.
• What they’re "protecting" us from – "Every single person who'd attack Steve Jobs on any of these grounds is, demonstrably, worse at business than Jobs. They're unqualified to assert that liberal values are bad for business, when the demonstrable, factual, obvious evidence contradicts those assertions."

• Open Finder folder in Terminal – Ooh, neat. Almost worth upgrading to Lion for this alone. (Warning: not in the least bit true for most people.)
• Losing the HP Way – "In today’s world of MBA-managed companies, R&D is perceived as not being a good use of money." And HP used to be a great engineering company. Sad.

• Social Media Propaganda Posters – "Be brief! The enemy might be listening in!"
• Norway attacks: Oslo hit by bomb explosion and youths shot at camp – Shocking. Both because it's Norway and because it's a city that I've spent a lot of time in.

Today the Daily Mail is complaining about a joke that was broadcast on the News Quiz in October last year. (Is it still considered news six months after the event?)

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading the article, so, to summarise:

1. Broadcasting a joke that implies, but doesn’t use, a swear word is bad
2. But printing the same joke in a newspaper is okay
3. Broadcasting scantily clad women dancing is bad
4. But printing pictures of the same is okay
5. Putting quotes around a word to indicate disdain is good writing
6. A single complaint represents The Silent Majority
7. Mob rule would be a good thing
8. Potentially causing offence is grounds for severe sanctions
9. (But see bullets two and four for exceptions)
10. Knee-jerk liberals — whatever they are — are a wide-spread problem
11. Knee-jerk tabloids are okay
12. Personal responsibility is good
13. (Unless we have to exercise it ourselves)
14. Your opinion is wrong
15. Mine is right
16. Banning stuff that we don’t like represents freedom
17. Stating things as fact makes them true
18. Black is white
19. We’ve always been at war with Eastasia

I may have veered off target a little at the end but I think that’s pretty close to the core of the article. Did I miss anything?

• Yahoo! Finds! Buyer! For! Doomed! Delicious! – Hopefully good news for Delicious.com.

• Fukushima is a triumph for nuke power: Build more reactors now! – Despite multiple failures there has been no significant release of radiation.
• Japan Earthquake: before and after – Amazing and shocking.
• Why I am not worried about Japan’s nuclear reactors – I did think that the coverage suggesting a nuclear disaster was unlikely. This explains why my intuition was (probably) right.

This week I’ve released updates to all three of my iPhone and iPad apps.

Yummy and Yummy Browser, my Delicious.com client, see the release of a big update: version 2.6.0. It includes a completely new bookmark viewing and editing screen, a new bookmark list view, updates to help syncing reliability and lots of smaller tweaks and updates. It’s the biggest gap between any two major releases but I think is a good one.

The www.cut update is much smaller, but includes the new Facebook API (looks the same!) and some minor aesthetic tweaks.

Hidden, and not mentioned in the release notes for any of the apps, is a crash reporter. Apple do push crash logs into their developer interface, but they do seem to skip some and it only ever happens when users sync their phones to iTunes — something that people seem to be doing less and less. I’ve seen reviews and support mails from people mentioning crashes but not seen the crash reports — which makes it really difficult to diagnose a problem. Hopefully you’ll never see it, but now they’ll prompt you to send the log directly to me after a crash.

However, even with that it’s still worth pinging me a support email if you see something amiss. Firstly, if it doesn’t crash I still won’t see it. And, secondly, the crash reports come without any context. Seeing which line of code is causing a problem is very useful but without knowing how you get there it can be very difficult to correctly diagnose and fix a problem.