This is ZX81.org.uk

It was nothing like as dramatic as my iBook dying one evening, but there was no getting around the fact that my nearly five year old MacBook was no longer up to the tasks that I was trying to throw at it. Developing applications, even for resource limited devices such as the iPhone, needs a pretty substantial piece of Mac software called Xcode. My photography pushed me towards getting Aperture to manage all my pictures. It’s great, but it did have a tendency to grind to a halt when it was least convenient.

• 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.

• Twitter tells third-party devs to stop making Twitter client apps – “More significantly, it demonstrates the vulnerability of building a business on top of a Web platform that is controlled by a single vendor.” This is exactly the lesson I found with my Delicious.com client.
• Illinois scrubs death penalty – Another step in the right direction.
• NYT and “torture”: Searching for a justification – Apparently the definition of torture depends very much on who is doing it.

The back-story to this post is that I’m the secretary of the company that owns the freehold to my flat. In the UK, Companies House keeps records of all the companies in the UK. One of the documents they keep on file is called the Memorandum and Articles of Association. This ream of legalese describes what a company is allowed to do and how it should go about doing it.

• Sinclair ZX81: 30 years old tomorrow – “Tomorrow, 5 March 2011, marks the 30th anniversary of the arrival of the machine that did more to awaken ordinary Britons to the possibilities offered by home computing: the Sinclair ZX81.” Given my domain name, I had to link to this.
• Bill Gates Says Anti-Vaccine Autism Groups “Kill Children” — And He’s Right – “And it is dangerously idiotic when the bad choice in question kills children.”

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.

• Christchurch earthquake – Shocking stuff, made all the more real by the great images.
• Why Last Week’s Solar Storm Was a Dud – “If the plasma’s magnetic field is parallel to the Earth’s, the incoming charged particles are effectively blocked from entering Earth’s magnetosphere. An identical flare with a perpendicular magnetic field would have triggered a much stronger storm.”

Seth Godin has had a couple of posts recently about how to treat your best customers. One of the thing that he observes is that the way you define “best” is not necessarily the most obvious. Is a customer that pays full price always better than one that recommends your service to five of their friends?

In defining the best customers, my mind wandered to the opposite extreme, the worst customers. This reminds me of something that happened a few years ago. It’s only fair to note that I heard this “through the grape-vine.” It could be completely true or mostly made up, but where-ever it falls I think it’s an interesting anecdote.

• Apple’s Three Laws of Developers – The hidden link from sci-fi books to the App Store. Only funny because it’s true…
• Biting the source that feeds you – “Keller, a journalist of unimpeachable accomplishment and stature, just had to trash a guy whose organization has struck the most powerful blow against official secrecy in a generation, somebody who may yet be jailed for what he did, an eccentric but unquestionably transformational media player.”

Then I heard about GetLocalization (whose name needs localising!), a site which allows you to “crowd-source” translations. I honestly don’t know if it will work but I thought it was a good idea and something worth trying and supporting.