Skip to main contentTag: Links
- Mike Ash on Private APIs – Nice discussion on the pros and cons of using private API’s in your applications. The only time I’ve consciously used them was years ago with a large PL/SQL program on an Oracle database. I got all the upside (quicker development) without any of the down (having to maintain it). Yuk yuk.
- Electric dreams for pop in 2009 – Apparently synth-pop is making a come-back for 2009. Yay! Less derivative guitar bands and more cheesy pop please!
- 2008 – The Year in Pictures – Some really beautiful images in here. Wish my photography was up to their standard!
- Market Yourself An iParadigm – “The part I love the most is that the people making the ‘just market your app!’ comment have no real idea how much effective marketing costs. Oh sure, you can go far on viral and word-of-mouth marketing, but it all pales in comparison to even a small banner graphic in the App Store.” Making your application visible is hard.
- Matthew Alexander on Torture – Nice examples of why torture doesn’t work. Worth reading the linked articles.
- Robbery suspect left his address – “Chicago police have arrested a man who allegedly robbed a bank using a threatening note written on the back of his own pay cheque.” Brilliant.
- Reliving Cuba’s revolution – Interesting to see this on “film.” They wouldn’t let us take cameras up there when I visited in 2004. (Plenty of other pictures of Cuba on ZX81.org.uk though!)
- What Carriers Aren’t Eager to Tell You About Texting – “Once one understands that a text message travels wirelessly as a stowaway within a control channel, one sees the carriers’ pricing plans in an entirely new light.” I worked on text messaging software back in the late nineties and, at least for GSM, is absolutely true.
- Internet sites could be given ‘cinema-style age ratings’, Culture Secretary says – “Giving film-style ratings to individual websites is one of the options being considered, [Andy Burnham, British Culture Secretary confirms].” The government still seems not to understand how the internet works. If implemented, this will basically result in a system that’s easy to circumvent and is paid for with higher ISP connection fees. We all lose.
- Happy Birthday Earthrise – “Oh, my God! Look at that picture over there! Isn’t that something…” Still very much awe-inspiring even forty years later.
- Fearless: Apple’s Macworld Expo exit is part of its DNA – “In Apple’s estimation, the best time to kill off a successful product or brand is ‘as soon as possible.’ Dropping a winner means creating a new winner to replace it, and that’s exactly what Apple has decided it must do to be successful: create great new products again and again.”
- If programming languages were religions… – Apparently I’m into Voodoo and Taoism…
- The Great Indie Bake Off 2008 – iPhone App inspired cakes. Vote for Pedro^H^H^H^H^H Yummy!
- Are iPhone users just tight? – “Right now the iTunes Application Store is no more than an online Poundshop: customers will come in, take a look around and maybe even buy some tat they didn’t know they wanted, but if the iPhone is going to be taken seriously then the boys from Cupertino are going to have to find a way to make users come to the store looking for something, and go away satisfied having spent more than a dollar.”
- WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” – Yet another update to WordPress, the software I use to power ZX81.org.uk. Quite a big change so it’s possible that something has broken. Please let me know if you find anything.
- Old computer ads – From high tech to laughable in only a few years. I love this kind of thing. Are any computers today going to have this much nostalgia value?
- Bagpuss and Ivor creator dies – How many British people my age didn’t love Ivor the engine and Bagpus?
- What have you tried? – “To argue that grabbing the completed solution in some way satisfies this process is laziness and intellectual dishonesty, and probably renders you unworthy of being helped. For after all, why should someone else do your work for you?”
- Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over ‘child porn’ album cover – As a general principle I don’t appreciate my Internet connection being censored. In this case, two things stand out. Firstly, is this really “child porn”? Secondly, why are connections denied silently? Could they not tell me why the page is being blocked rather than just sever the connection? (I get a generic “could not connect” error message.)
- Amazon.co.uk: MP3 store – DRM-free MP3 music downloads – iTunes finally has a major competitor in the UK. Prices are similar, perhaps a little lower, but the main differentiator is that everything is in MP3 format and DRM-free.
- Lessons from Mumbai – “Terrorism is rare. If a bunch of men with guns and grenades is all they really need, then why isn’t this sort of terrorism more common? Why not in the U.S., where it’s easy to get hold of weapons? It’s because terrorism is very, very rare.”