This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Road Trip!” Here is my entry. This was taken on a journey from the the Bay Area to Tahoe.

For this weeks PhotoFriday, “Beach,” I went all the way back to my first visit to San Francisco, with this image of Baker Beach. You can see the famous Bay Area fog and — if you expect all of California to be as warm as LA — lots of overdressed people.

Please vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Reflections.” I’m entry number 81.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Reflections.” My entry is a reflection of a building in London.

I don’t post an entry for last weeks challenge, so there’s no need to vote for me. (There are still some good ones!)

I went through quite a few thoughts and pictures before I settled on this one for the PhotoFriday theme “Orange.” I went clever-but-not-in-the-spirit picture of a wind-farm in Orange county, then obvious photographs of oranges or orange sweets. But I finally went for this rust on a canon in Rhodes.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Wet.” I’m entry number 64.

It’s easy to forget how much computers have changed over a relatively short. time. A book I found in my old room at my parent house, “Simpleton Explores Microcomputers,” helped me get some perspective.

I don’t know exactly when it’s from, but it’s certainly early eighties. Possibly 1983 or 1984.

It explores the computers that are available at the time and what it’s like to own one. One of the most telling aspects is that it’s written for people who have never owned, possibly used, a computer.

It all starts out with a detailed plan. Then someone says, “Can we deliver by October?” A few features get cut, some of the estimates get revised downwards and everyone gets back to work. Then you get to the end of September and find that someone removed all the contingency and that in the rush to finish the requirements a heap of important stuff got missed.

You spend days, weeks, quite possibly months pushing to get the software developed and, a few months before the real end, a crunch point is reached. It’s missing what’s now realised to be critical functionality; it takes an hour to process something that should be instant; the data doesn’t look like you thought it would; it’s too late for any real benefit to be obtained.

This weeks PhotoFriday theme is “Wet.” My entry is some wet hand prints on the concrete tiles of out back yard.

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.