Category Archives: Uncategorized

This post has been a while in the writing, I suppose waiting for the perfect time to publish it. The two things that happened today to make me finally commit it to electrons were the news about Robin Williams, and … Continue reading →

The title is borrowed from an economics article by Art Carden, which is of no further relevance to this post. Interesting read though, yes? I’m enjoying the discussion in the iOS Developer Community™ about dependency of app makers on third-party … Continue reading →

There’s a post by clever security guy Jim Bird on Appsec’s Agile Problem: how can security experts participate in fast-moving agile (or Agile™) projects without either falling behind or dragging the work to a halt? I’ve been the Appsec person … Continue reading →

On October 19th, 1994 NeXT Computer, Inc. (later NeXT Software, Inc.) published a specification for OpenStep, a cross-platform interface for application programming, based on their existing Objective-C frameworks and the Display PostScript graphics system. A little bit of history First … Continue reading →

I was asked “what books do you consider essential for app making”? Here’s the list. Most of these are not about specific technologies, which are fleeting and teach low-level detail. Those that are tech-specific also contain a good deal of … Continue reading →

Members of comfortable societies such as English towns have expectations of the services they will receive. They want their rubbish disposed of before it builds up too much, for example. They don’t so much care how it’s dealt with, they … Continue reading →

You can find plenty of dogmatic positions in software development, in blogs, in podcasts, in books, and even in academic articles. “You should (always/never) write tests before writing code.” “Pair programming is a (good/bad) use of time.” “(X/not X) considered … Continue reading →

Solaris 10, scheduled to be supported until January, 2021, can still run BSD binaries built for Solaris 1 (a retroactive name for SunOS 4.1), released in 1991. I wonder for how long the apps we wrote for our iPhones back … Continue reading →

As I write this, the WWDC keynote presentation has been over for a little more than half a day. That, apparently, is plenty of time in which to evaluate a new version of an operating system based on a few … Continue reading →

Back in the early days of astronomy, the problem of the stars that wander from fixed positions in the sky needed solving. Many astronomers, not the first of which was Ptolemy, proposed that these “planetai” could be modeled as following … Continue reading →