• Arab society’s crunch points – Interesting talk about the Middle East and how change might be made. Hint: it doesn’t involve “regime change.”
• iPhone-to-iPad development: How’s the timing going to work out? – “We have very little guidance on how iPad apps should behave, and if we want our apps to be in the store at its launch, we have to do the majority of development without ever running our code on a real iPad (or even having used one).”

“Surfaces,” this weeks PhotoFriday theme, is kind of an odd subject, I mean in some sense almost everything is or has a surface. But what I liked about the Getty Museum in Los Angeles is that the whole building was strange shapes and surfaces, something that I tried to get across in this image. Which I thought made it a decent candidate for this weeks challenge.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Distant.” I’m entry 189.

• Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? – “Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells.”
• Penguins, Peaks and Penny-Farthings: Nat Geo Covers 1959-2000 – “The National Geographic Society celebrates its 122nd anniversary on Jan. 27 … Though the early issues had rather drab academic looking covers, by 1959 they were consistently adorned with eye-cathing art and photos.”
• Verified by Visa bitchslapped by Cambridge researchers – “Secondary credit card security systems for online transactions such as Verified by Visa are all about shifting blame rather then curtailing fraud, Cambridge University security researchers argue.” Or put another way: those annoying screens you get when you buy something online are not for your benefit.

• Realism in UI Design – “The more realistic something is, the harder it is to figure out the meaning.”
• Jan. 19, 1983: Apple Gets Graphic With Lisa – And without the Lisa there wouldn’t have been the Mac…
• Googlephone No Match for Kafkaesque Carriers – Steven Levy finds that mobile (cell) carriers are all evil… I wish this was an isolated problem but it seems to happen everywhere. Does anyone actually like their provider?

I saw this car a few weeks ago and thought that the crumpled headlight was interesting. I went back a day or so later and took a few pictures. I thought this might make a good entry for this weeks PhotoFriday theme, “Damaged.”

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Slowly.” I’m entry number 181.

I flipped through lots of images for this weeks PhotoFriday theme,
“Slowly,” but I thought that this image fitted the bill and was a little different from most of the photos already posted. It’s of a line of camels slowly plodding towards our camp in Wadi Rum, Jordan.

I didn’t post an entry for last weeks PhotoFriday. (Indeed I was so busy that I didn’t even vote for my own entry in the challenge the previous week! No wonder I didn’t win.)

• Priori Acute – What if M.C. Escher had been a typographer?
• What “Nothing to Hide” is Hiding – Why “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” is a bad argument in favour of increased surveillance.

• Google Android Personal Thoughts – “Uniformity is not a word you’ll find in Android’s dictionary. How about the fact that the application icons aren’t the same size. Uh, why? Since there’s no transparent padding around the icons … there’s no uniformity in the touch areas when you go to tap on an icon.” These things probably don’t seem important to Google but the attention to detail is what makes the iPhone (usually) a pleasure to use. I’ve not used an Android handset but these things would bug me pretty quickly.
• Japanese Photographer Bends Electricity to His Will – Beautiful.
• The Cost of Care – Nice graphic showing the relationship between the cost of healthcare and life-expectancy.

I got a lot done and with the ninety minutes I saved by not commuting I went to the gym, but there are problems with working from home…

I don’t mean to single out a single business here. The flaw I’m pointing out is shared by many sites but this post was inspired by a recent visit to TripIt. In general it’s a great service. It’s well thought out, allowing you to enter all your details with a minimum of effort; just forwarding your email confirmation to them is a masterstroke.

However. (You knew that was coming.) However, many links on the main page are non-functional, by which I mean they push you straight through to their paid-for service sign-up form.