- Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so [a rant] – “Many people in the United States purchase one or fewer books every year. Many of those people have seen every single episode of American Idol. There is clearly a correlation here.” Wholeheartedly agree with this post. Not knowing stuff is fine. Being proud of not knowing stuff? Not so much.
- Twitter Can Predict the Stock Market – “Mao compared the national mood to the Dow Jones Industrial Average. She found that one emotion, calmness, lined up surprisingly well with the rises and falls of the stock market — but three or four days in advance.”
- Ideas are Nothing – Execution is Everything – “How often have you been approached by somebody who has a great idea for an iPhone app, and they will tell you the idea if you just do the programming, and then you will both share in the profits? As an aside, I wonder if this happens to book authors as well.”
- ‘Fractal’ mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot dies aged 85 – Ah, I remember all that time playing with Fractint on my 386SX… And I still don’t really understand the maths.
A few years ago I was very much “into” the whole open source movement. I read LWN (still do, actually). I bought a copy of The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
But one thing I never really did was contribute to open source projects. I never really had much need. They largely did what I wanted and when they didn’t, well, the modifications were too big to consider attempting in my spare time.
- Aerial views of New York – Neat pictures of Manhattan (and bits of New Jersey).
- Wallace and Gromit to appear on Christmas stamps – For once: Christmas stamps that I approve of.
- My First Week with the iPhone – I always assumed that a touch device like the iPhone would be pretty much useless for blind users. It’s good to be wrong.
- Protest The Pope – My images from todays “Protest the Pope” march and rally in London.
- Introducing: Yummy 2.5 – New version of Yummy, my iOS Delicious.com client, is now available on the App Store. Now includes iPad support, works better on iOS4 and has experimental pinboard.in support.
- Pope adviser calls UK a Third World Country, deploys racism, then says atheists are aggressive – “The Vatican said the cardinal had not intended ‘any kind of slight’, and was referring to the UK’s multicultural society.” Well that’s okay, then. (Not.)
- Why parents can’t do maths today – Article on how they teach arithmetic in British schools. I think the interesting thing is that approaches to both long division and multiplication are now more heuristics than algorithms.
- Catholics, it’s you this Pope has abused – Why even Catholics should Protest The Pope.
- There’s more to colour than meets the eye – Nice discussion of colours and what they “mean.”
- Compromising Twitter’s OAuth security system – " What it comes down to is that OAuth 1.0a is a horrible solution to a very difficult problem. It works acceptably well for server-to-server authentication, but there are far too many unresolved issues in the current specification for it to be used as-is on a widespread basis for desktop applications. It’s simply not mature enough yet." This is pretty much what I found implementing OAuth for Yahoo! in Yummy.
It’s nearly four years old now, so I do expect the odd beach ball occasionally. When my MacBook is doing something hard or complex or just opening iTunes, it often shows its “I’m too busy to respond to you right now” indicator. But this time it was different. The beachball appeared and didn’t really go away again. Sure, it occasionally hid but as soon as I instructed the machine to do anything it would return.
- Introducing iOS Beta Builder – Make distributing beta versions of iPhone software so much easier.
- This Summer’s Sexiest Images From Saturn – Wow. Amazing images from Cassini.