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, (and one of the things I think makes this accusation especially insidious is that this might not be obvious to a layman reading the article, but should be obvious to the FSF), you can be sure that if software on the phone was sending your location out to ‘them’, some inquisitive geek would see the network traffic and figure it out.  Third, (and making the other points almost moot), you’re using a cellphone.  The phone company’s cells track your phone’s location anyway (they have to know which cell you’re in, after all).  ‘They’ already know where you are.

Spam just gets weirder. I guess this is more realistic than Robert Mugabe’s second-step-nephew wanting to wire me $10,000,000. I almost want to reply and see what “Mr Rinaggio”’s scam really is. Surely it can’t be as straightforward as getting me to pay for a dog then not delivering it to my “nearest airport”?

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.

There is a fair amount of complaining on The Internets at the moment about Objective-C and Apple’s choice to use it for the iPhone. Many newcomers to the ‘platform’ (if I can apply a singular name to Mac and iPhone development) are finding the language - and the Cocoa frameworks based on it - very confusing. Just how can a language with sooooo many square brackets! be at-all easy to use, after all?

This weekend, I cleaned out the ex-belongings of the previous residents of our flat that had been sitting in the sort-of-corridor-area outside our door since we moved in (if you’ve been in our flat, you’ll know what I mean). Amongst the waitressing clothes, semi-broken electronics and Christmas ornaments was this mysterious and highly dubious looking CD. With curiosity (and a healthy dose of trepidation), I played it today. I was mightily surprised.

“Which one accurately depicts the way your software treats the user in the event of an emergency?”

From Jeff Atwood’s www.codinghorror.com. I am not sure I agree with the article completely, but I love the imagery.

In which a five-minute hack to put the current working directory in the title bar of the Terminal descends into hours learning the surprising arcanities of BASH.

Like most developers, I spend a lot of time at my computer living in Terminal (and the rest Xcode)*. I have what might be a strange tendency to open a new Terminal window for each new task, I think so that I don’t have to lose the context in my current window. This means that after I’ve finished doing something (or in the middle, when I look at the screen and my obsessive-compulsive side grabs me and says “Wow, that’s messy. I need to tidy up my desktop before I can do more work”) I often find myself with a vast number of Terminals open, with the majority sitting minimised in the Dock, and no idea which ones are actually still useful.

Taken when I opened my laptop in an Edinburgh coffee shop. I would guess that BT’s broadband people are pretty happy.

Easter’s just past, and Cadbury’s Creme Eggs are cheap. I’m a sucker for cheap things, so I couldn’t help buying some. The problem is that a whole Creme Egg is rather intense, especially when there’s not the excuse of Easter to egg me on (ha-ha, egg me on. I crack me up…).

Recently, we’ve been watching “Willie’s Wonky Chocolate Factory” on TV. In the programme, Wille Harcourt-Cooze evangelises his “100% cacao” (grown on his own small plantation in Venezuela) chocolate bars for cookery (I think that Creme Eggs are probably about as far as you can get from his Venezuelan Black while still technically staying in the realm of “chocolate product”). One thing always niggles me when he cooks with them though - butter and sugar are almost invariably added to the 100% cacao. ‘Normal’ chocolate bars are only not 100% cacao because they have fat and sugar added already.