This is ZX81.org.uk

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.

• Pope merchandise – “The pope is visiting the UK soon, and the merchandise is already on sale, but it’s rubbish. This week’s challenge is to show the Vatican what they should be selling to mark the occasion. God will be delighted.” (via @bengoldacre)
• The Creativity Crisis – “The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.” It’s always bugged me when people refer to ’the creatives’ when talking about designers or artists. This is why! But back to the article… it’s interesting that you can “teach” or at least encourage creativity.

• The origins of abc – “We will begin where civilisation began, meander through the Middle Ages, race through the Renaissance, and in doing so discover where our alphabet originated, how and why it evolved, and why, for example, an A looks, well, like an A.”
• Icelander’s Campaign Is a Joke, Until He’s Elected – This is brilliant. “A polar bear display for the zoo. Free towels at public swimming pools. A “drug-free Parliament by 2020.” Iceland’s Best Party, founded in December by a comedian, Jon Gnarr, to satirize his country’s political system, ran a campaign that was one big joke. Or was it?”