Last week, GitHub was the victim of a days long denial of service attack that meant that it wasn’t available reliably despite the hard work of their team.

What surprised me was the number of people on Twitter complaining that they couldn’t work. I was surprised because one of the key things about Git (the tool rather than the website) is that it is distributed, that is there is no centralised server in the way that there is with, say, Subversion. Clearly there are things you can’t do without GitHub – most obviously downloading new repositories – but almost everything else can be done peer-to-peer. The rest of this post explains how.

I thought showing the hustle and bustle of a busy area at night would be a good interpretation of the theme “City” — this weeks PhotoFriday theme. Or if not good, at least different from most of the other entries, which seem to be sky-scrapers from a distance(!).

I’ve seen quite a few people saying that it isn’t possible to move an iOS app from paid to being free with an in-app purchase to unlock the full functionality. Fortunately they’re wrong.

“Traditionally” I would have had to remove version one from sale and offer a completely new app, which would have meant that existing users would have to pay again to get the same functionality. Or I’d have to support two apps. Or I’d keep the same app in the store and all existing users would get downgraded to the free version. None of these solutions seemed fair to existing users.

One of the great things about WordPress is the community and the number of great plugins that can do amazing things with little effort.

But all that code, as any good developer will tell you, is a liability. How do you pick a plugin that not only meets your requirements now, but will both continue to do so? WordPress advances. APIs change. Plugins need love too.

Many moons ago I settled upon Flickr Gallery, a plugin that allows you to import Flickr images just by adding a short-code to posts. I thought there was value in keeping all my public photos in one place and, at that time, WordPress had poor media management facilities. The plugin seemed popular and well supported.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Sunrise” (the second time this subject has been used!). This is one of an increasing number of decent pictures taken on my iPhone rather than my SLR.

I missed last weeks challenge, so no need to vote for me!

“Preview” is damaged and can’t be opened. You should move it to the Trash.

This was the rather surprising error message that I’ve been getting when I try to open a PDF from the Finder since I upgraded to OS X Yosemite. It’s bad enough when you get an error message, but one suggesting that you delete a frequently used app is inconvenient to say the least!

When I think of “Stillness,” this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, I tend to think of a lake; an apparently unmoving body of water. (A lot of the other entries, to my eyes at least, don’t represent “Stillness.” Of course, mine may well miss the mark for them…)

Whatever its merits, this one was taken near Spooner Lake, which is very near Lake Tahoe.

I didn’t have an entry in the last challenge, so there’s no need to vote for me(!).

It’s important to have a Top 10 list. I know this as every other site has one. I don’t want to miss out. So here are the top ten most read posts here this year, with the year they were originally published in parenthesis:

1. QA Mindf**k
2. Do Apple take 40% in the EU? (2011)
3. Learning Swift
4. iOS Developer Program: from individual to company (2011)
5. How do I do “X” in Swift?
6. AQGridView to UICollectionView (2013)
7. iPhone Dev: Saving State (2010)
8. NSFetchedResultsController and iCloud
9. Why you need a crash reporter (2011)
10. Sophia Smith (2006)

If there’s a lesson here in increasing readership it’s simple: get retweeted by people with lots of followers.

Preamble: In pre-Swift and pre-ARC days of development on Apple’s platforms, it was necessary to “manually” retain and release objects as you used and discarded them. One common, but incorrect, pattern that kept reappearing was the idea that you could use the retainCount method to ascertain whether an object was still being used.

## When to use -retainCount? Never!

There’s pretty much never a good reason to use -retainCount. Here’s a short and mildly abusive explanation why.

This weeks PhotoFriday them is “Blue” and these are bluebells (I think), which should count, even though there aren’t technically blue.

I didn’t enter last weeks challenge, so I’m not going to insist that you vote for me. (In fact, the last time I forgot to even vote for myself!)