John Gruber’s latest post, “Private”, calls Erica Sadun to task for her invention of a distinction between “private APIs” and “unpublished API’s”.  I completely agree.  The distinction is nonsensical.

On technical grounds, of course, it’s a valid distinction, if not a valid characterisation.  Her “unpublished” APIs are APIs that are available in public frameworks, but not documented in the headers.  Her “private” APIs are APIs in private frameworks (i.e. those with no headers, installed in the “PrivateFrameworks” directory, as opposed to the “Frameworks” directory).

There’s also a distinction from a programmer-level point of view.  It’s much easier to use a …

“Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. We are the hope of those boys who have so little, who’ve been told that they cannot have what they dream, that they cannot be what they imagine. Yes, they can.”^[1]

I shy away from discussing politics online. I’m aware how hard it can be to convey nuance, and I’m also naturally one of those infuriating people who can see good intentions an both sides of …

The FSF has published their “5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G”.  They have some valid points, but I’d be much more likely to respect them if the things like this they produced were not laden in hyperbole.  The article is full of it, but one piece of ‘information’ in particular struck me:

It’s also a tracking device, and like other proprietary GPS-enabled phones, can transmit your location without your knowledge

First, GPS is passive.  The phone receives GPS signals from the satellites, it doesn’t transmit them to the satellites.  ‘They’ can’t track you just because you have a GPS phone.  Second,…

From a link on Hacker News (the occasionally interesting “Reddit for Erlang, Lisp and Haskell using proto-entrepreneurs”), this 2006 ACM Ubiquity article:

Every programmer with a few years’ experience or education has heard the phrase “premature optimization is the root of all evil.” […] Unfortunately, as with many ideas that grow to legendary status, the original meaning of this statement has been all but lost”

I would not agree with all the proposed solutions to the problem, but I do agree with most of the observations.

One of the most frustrating things I found when working on performance at Apple …