• ‘should be cheaper than free’ – “I’m angry at the customers who send me nasty emails or reviews, threatening me with ‘telling Apple to remove it’ or rating it 1 star with a ’should be cheaper than free’ remark because after paying the ridiculously exorbitant 99c, they found it didn’t live up to expectations. "
• Hurdie Ho! – Maybe you had to be there and read the copy of Your Sinclair that this was originally published in, but this still makes me laugh.
• Museum looks at 2000-year history of the computer – The Computer History Museum was excellent even before this new exhibit. Recommended.

• Nov. 10, 1999: Metric Math Mistake Muffed Mars Meteorology Mission – Sometimes the simplest of mistakes have the most dramatic consequences.
• Linotype: The Film – The revolution in printing before DTP… soon in documentary form.

A new version of my handy URL shortening app for iPhone and iPod touch has just hit Apple’s App Store. Please go and download it — it’s free!

I’ve added to the services that were supported in the previous version and now www.cut supports nine shortening services:

• is.gd
• bit.ly
• cli.gs
• tinyurl.com
• to.ly
• cuthut.com
• uCut.it
• rfly.me
• tiny.cc

Also new in version 2.0 is a “URL Scheme.” This is a technical name for something that’s very useful. Picture the scene: you’re in Safari and you want to send the current URL to www.cut. Previously you had to copy the URL to the clipboard and manually launch it. Now, all you need to do is add “wwwcut:” to the beginning of the URL and www.cut launches automatically.

• 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.

• 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.

• MacPaint and QuickDraw source code – This is awesome: the original source code to two of the most important pieces of software from the 1980’s.
• If I have two children, and one is a boy, what are the odds that – Where common sense makes no sense. Sometimes. Probably.
• June 23, 1912: Computer Pioneer Alan Turing Born – “He’s also a genuinely interesting figure, albeit a tragic one. An eccentric who liked to bicycle while wearing a gas mask and who occasionally wore pajama tops underneath suit jackets, he was also a prodigious and eclectic genius.”

“Do you ever change this type of trade?”

I was sat on the trading floor discussing a new feature that I was implementing with the person who would be using it the most.

“No, never.”

This was one detail of the change that would have far-reaching consequences in the code. A “no” would mean a few days of development, a “yes” would indicate several weeks.

“Are you absolutely sure? You don’t change it even once a month?”

• iPad App Pricing – Nice analysis of iPad and iPhone application pricing.
• The Value of Ideas – “Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.” Or actions speak louder than words.
• The IBM Muppet Show – “IBM. The Muppets. Two venerable institutions-but not ones we tend to associate with each other. Yet in the late 1960s, before most people had ever seen a computer in person or could identify a Muppet on sight, the two teamed up when IBM contracted with Jim Henson for a series of short films designed to help its sales staff.”

• The November Plan – Post now updated with my recent trip to Austria.
• Apple’s Mistake – “How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that’s just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.”
• The Daily Shoot – A great idea to help people (myself included!) to take more pictures. I think a lot of us have the will, just not the time or inspiration. Time is hard but inspiration just got a little easier.

• A Sense of Entitlement: Tweetie 2 – I think Apple needs to do more here — to allow for paid upgrades — but I also congratulate the author of Tweetie for having the nerve to charge for a significant update. He’ll come across a lot of resistance but it’s absolutely the right thing to do and it, potentially, paves the way for smaller developers to do the same thing.
• Peep Show ‘won’t change’ for anyone – Looking forward to this. Slightly worried that it might overstay its welcome — how can you top eating a family pet in terms of gross out? — but then I thought that for the last couple of series too…
• Fail Yet Succeed? – Nice discussion of the kind of things that all software projects go through. Really this is about half of my job!