Duck Rowing

In 2007, I was working in Manhattan writing Java and Ruby as a hired gun.

As I explained in my previous post, I decided to get my niece and nephew some cheap laptops for Christmas.

I have a nephew who is eight years old and a niece who is five.

Chris Messina on Privacy: Maintaining your privacy doesn’t strictly mean keeping people from having data or information about you.

Getting to know Siri:

Might as well enjoy the view before the winter starts.

A colleague recently sent me this Git flow chart for “cleaning” a project history: People know that version control is a hobby horse of mine, so I get this stuff a lot.

I’m not an analyst or even that much of an Apple speculator when it comes to deals and strategy.

I dunno how I missed this one.

I’m a Nisus Writer fan.

I caught an interesting link (via Michael Tsai) about Facebook modifying Mercurial to operate faster than Git.

Let’s hope this is true.

As you might have heard, Veruca Salt is back together and going on tour this Summer.

I just ran across an interesting post by Serban Constantin asking if the next holy war will be Git vs.

Time to call Congress.

Snow bunnies are invading

The problem is not that the NSA is spying on you, it’s that you noticed.

The NSA is even spying on elected officials.

This seems to be a common criticism leveled at Edward Snowden, but we have to remember that Bradley Manning, a whistleblower that exposed US war crimes, was held in solitary confinement, prevented from speaking to the press, and tortured.

John McLaughlin has an op-ed from a parallel universe in which the 4th Amendment does not exist (via Washington Post): Any efforts to “rein in” the [NSA] must allow for the possibility that change risks serious damage to U.S. security and the country’s ab…

Judge Edward Korman, a Regan appointee serving on the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, just dismissed a lawsuit challenging the government’s unlawful searches and seizures of laptops of journalists at US border crossings.

I’m an Apple user from phones to computers, but man is this a great advertisement for open source operating systems.

Brent Simmons musing about surveillance on his blog: If the Internet Age began in 1995 or so, then the Surveillance Age began in 2001.

John Gruber has been reacting to news that Chromebooks had an outstanding sales increase: Gregg Keizer, reporting for Computerworld: Chromebooks’ holiday success at Amazon was duplicated elsewhere during the year, according to the NPD Group, which tracked…

Around seven years ago I made the leap from Subversion to distributed version control.

Never too late for a pardon.

Fred Vogelstein’s released a new book entitled Dogfight: How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution, which is an insider informed narrative of the Apple vs.

There are a number of discussions at apple describing problems iOS 7 users are having with wifi syncing between iOS devices and iTunes: ios 7 does not sync with itunes via WIFI Music not syncing after iOS 7 update Can’t Wifi Connect to iPhone 5 or iPad 2…

Thom Holwerda of OSNews on Microsoft considering giving away Windows Phone and Windows RT to OEMs for free: So, let me get this straight.

Death to Dashboard.

From InfoQ via Reddit: Yesterday, a developer on the Jenkins project accidentally triggered a force push on the GitHub repositories that store the Git repositories for the Jenkins codebase, wiping out several months of commits.

You should be using CocoaPods CocoaPods is a great tool for managing libraries in OS X or iOS development projects.

Jump to the TL;DR When Apple released the latest version of the iWork applications last month, people freaked out.

Apple’s Mail application remains the best option for IMAP email on OS X.

Joe Kissell’s piece about Sea Lion and Gmail (I’m sticking with that name) has been getting a lot of attention, mostly for pointing out the shortcomings in Apple’s default mail client.

The endless game of cat and mouse…

App.net, which is basically a Twitter clone with a subscription business model, just reached it’s funding goals.

How exactly is something ahead of its time when it’s just a repackaged Linux desktop running in kiosk mode that neither consumers nor Linux geeks will love?

Do you have any idea what the street value of this mountain is?

This is an interesting read.

You will not hear me say this often, but Thom Holwerda is 100% correct.

Now with more pixels.

Literals in Objective-C.

About a year ago I bought an iPad 2.

Is it busywork?

More adventures in singletons.

Strange situation happened yesterday.

I got my digital copy of the new Steve Jobs biography delivered to my iPad.

Some notes about iCloud wigginess after converting my MobileMe account.

As operating systems move forward, sometimes older software gets left behind due to compatibility problems.