Uncategorized Posts

  • 04.24.08 Discussing the SDK-that-dare-not-speak-its-name (Uncategorized)

    WHEREAS the iP•••e SDK is technically under NDA (even though anyone in the world can sign up and download it); and

    WHEREAS most members of Apple developer mailing lists are aware that we are not supposed to discuss anything about the iP•••e SDK on those lists; and

    WHEREAS I and almost everyone else have good-naturedly gone along with this annoying ban; but

    WHEREAS more than a month has gone by, and there is still no forum for such … MORE

  • 01.07.08 “Crashing is an appropriate response” (Uncategorized)

    A bit of cryptography humor, from Peter Gutmann’s slideshow Everything you Never Wanted to Know about PKI but were Forced to Find Out …

    (Warning: This won’t make any sense unless you know what things like “PKI”, “self-signed certificates” and “revocation” are)

    … MORE

  • 11.18.07 Box2D (Uncategorized)

    Thanks to Steve Dekorte’s blog, I just ran across Box2D , an open-source 2D physics engine for games. In other words, it simulates the motion over time of convex polygons, taking into account inertia, gravity, collisions, friction, angular momentum, torque — all the things I once painstakingly learned in college and then completely forgot. Now they’ve suddenly become fascinating again, since Box2D does all the hard work. The app just has to describe the objects, … MORE

  • 07.16.07 How not to fix buffer overflows (Uncategorized)

    This tale of woe is making me rethink whether I want to be running any PHP-based software on my website.

    Yes, integer overflows happen to the best of us (even those of us who write popular algorithm textbooks), but I would hope that once one is pointed out, the people maintaining the code would have a clue about how to fix it.

    Stuff like “if (size>INT_MAX)…” is funny, but I find it even scarier that someone would … MORE

  • 07.07.07 Apricot Jam Recipe (Uncategorized)

    Here’s my family recipe for apricot jam, handed down through generations. One generation, really — my mom got it from a pamphlet put out by some local womens’ group, after we moved to an old ramshackle house in the middle of a huge but disused apricot orchard. The trees were old, but a lot of them still produced fruit, and it was no trouble to walk around and collect bucketsful. So we needed some way to make use of all that fruit…

    This recipe is different from the usual one you find packed in a box of pectin, because, well, it doesn’t use pectin. Instead, you thicken the jam by cooking it a lot longer. This means it tastes less like fresh fruit; but it has a wonderful taste of its own, a bit like dried apricots, and a nice gloopy texture. As a bonus, putting an apricot kernel1 in every jar gradually adds an almond-y aroma2.
    … MORE

  • 03.02.07 May I Nominate Mary Bono For “Jackass Of The Week”? (Uncategorized)

    Daring Fireball has an occasional feature called “Jackass Of The Week” that highlights exceptionally stupid or misleading public statements made about Apple. Lately it seems like “analyst” Rob Enderle has established a lifetime lock on the award, but on the off chance it’s still in play, I’d like to nominate Rep. Mary Bono (R, CA) based on “her rhetorical questions to Tim Berners-Lee (!) at a Congressional hearing yesterday”:http://www.macworld.com/news/2007/03/01/bernerslee/index.php :

    Bono questioned if [removing DRM] … MORE
  • 01.21.07 In Which I Think About Java Again, But Only For A Moment (Uncategorized)

    It’s amusing how Steve Jobs’ remarks disparaging the idea of Java on the iPhone have ignited controversy. His point was, obviously, that the iPhone’s browser won’t support Java applets; which is a no-brainer because applets were killed dead-dead-dead by Flash and Ajax. But this seems to have riled up everyone who still cares about non-server-based Java, leading to the weird situation of seeing “Java” and “Mac” in the same sentence again*. Apparently some people still … MORE