Seen at the end of a Kin­dle book I just finished:

Man­u­fac­tured in the United States and printed on acid-free paper. The paper used in this pub­li­ca­tion meets the min­i­mum require­ments of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992.

That’s a relief. I’d sure hate it if acidic paper cor­roded my Kindle’s RAM.

I keep an eye on var­i­ous job list­ing sites, and I’m fre­quently dis­mayed by the require­ments they spec­ify. Case in point: Craigslist has a list­ing for an iBooks Author con­trac­tor with a require­ment for two years of expe­ri­ence. The ini­tial release date for iBooks Author: Jan­u­ary 19^th, 2012.

Curi­ously, the “other require­ments” sec­tion fails to men­tion that appli­cants must sup­ply their own time machine.

Bit­coin — The Lib­er­tar­ian Intro­duc­tion [On Life and Lib­erty — Erik Voorhees]

An excel­lent gen­eral overview of what Bit­coin is. It does gloss over a few things that I con­sider prob­lem areas, though, so I’ll men­tion them here.

The first time a new user launches the Bit­coin client, it has to down­load the exist­ing blockchain (that is, the record of all pre­vi­ous Bit­coin trans­ac­tions). Right now this is about 1.5 GB, which may not seem like much to any­one with a good Inter­net con­nec­tion, but the down­load mech­a­nism is extremely slow. This means that the first-time user’s expe­ri­ence is going to be along the lines of “launch the client and wait at least a day before you can do any­thing with it.” This is likely to put off any­one with a casual inter­est, espe­cially given the way that it’s glossed over by Bit­coin advo­cates. In the­ory this will even­tu­ally be over­come by clients that don’t down­load the entire blockchain, but it’s cer­tainly a prob­lem now.

While the decen­tral­ized nature of Bit­coin makes it invul­ner­a­ble to the kind of gov­ern­ment attacks that have destroyed ear­lier attempts at alter­nate cur­ren­cies such as e-gold and the Lib­erty Dol­lar, it’s still pos­si­ble for some­one with more than 50% of the network’s com­put­ing power to destroy it. This is the thing that has me wary about Bitcoin’s future, as the Evil Empire does in fact have a great deal of com­put­ing power avail­able and a pre­vi­ously demon­strated will­ing­ness to destroy alter­nate cur­ren­cies. As Bit­coin increases in pop­u­lar­ity the net­work will get big­ger until it’s beyond any government’s abil­ity to destroy, but it’s still a dan­ger now while it’s not widely used.

Finally, Bit­coin is based on cryp­tog­ra­phy, which in most respects is a very good thing. How­ever, in cryp­tog­ra­phy some­thing which is unbreak­able today may not (indeed, prob­a­bly will not) be unbreak­able in twenty years. When you’re secur­ing your hard drive that doesn’t mat­ter, because you can just upgrade the encryp­tion as needed, but when your money sup­ply is depen­dent on the secu­rity of SHA-256, it’s a dif­fer­ent story. I haven’t seen any­thing I’d con­sider reli­able on just how eas­ily (if at all) the algo­rithms behind Bit­coin can be changed when it becomes necessary.

(Part of) Why Instapa­per and Sim­i­lar Are So Use­ful.

Read­WriteWeb, Jon Mitchell: Web­sites Have to Get Bet­ter:

Read-later apps are com­pe­ti­tion for noisy, ad-ridden web­sites. They rep­re­sent a sim­ple fact: Users hate our sites.

Sure do.

[inessential.com]

The Read­WriteWeb arti­cle is, per­haps unsur­pris­ingly, on one of those websites–and while I use ad-blocking soft­ware, I’m still not inter­ested in try­ing to read an arti­cle that takes up maybe a third of the screen, with the rest devoted to a bunch of graphic design­ers show­ing off how clever they are. I sent it to Instapa­per before the web­site had even fin­ished loading.

Ama­zon is rec­om­mend­ing Dia­blo 3 for me. After spend­ing 12–16 hours every day for months test­ing Dia­blo when I worked for Bliz­zard, I really never want to see Dia­blo any­thing ever again. Ever!

I decided to test the Dic­ta­tion fea­ture on my new iPad to see if it actu­ally worked. Here is my sam­ple text:

I say to the gods and the sons of gods the things that whet my thoughts; by the wells of the world there is none with the might to make me do his will.

Dic­ta­tion ren­dered that as:

Mes­sage the gods and the sons of guns the love my thoughts for the Wilson’s the world there is none within the com­mit­ment do his will

It’s a good thing I’ve got­ten bet­ter at touch-typing with an iPad.

I really like the git blame com­mand. In CM it’s pretty com­mon for an irate devel­oper to com­plain, “The build is bro­ken, fix it!” Tools like this are very use­ful for fig­ur­ing out what hap­pened. Although I’ve found that in prac­tice there’s a pretty good rule of thumb: the devel­oper who com­plained is almost always the per­son who broke the build.

Per­force is a Git Devel­oper. We’ve been study­ing Git for some time. We like to keep an eye on play­ers and tech­nol­ogy in our space, partly because it’s some­thing we think our cus­tomers appre­ci­ate, partly because it’s due dili­gence as a leader in the SCM/Version Man­age­ment space, and partly because it’s just plain inter­est­ing! But some­thing unex­pected hap­pened last sum­mer as a result of this study of com­pet­ing tech­nolo­gies: the rela­tion­ship between Git and Per­force turns out to have syn­er­gis­tic appeal with a peanut but­ter twist, as out­lined in my blog arti­cles Per­force and DVCS: Two great tastes that taste great together and Git as a Per­force Client.

[…]

But if you want to use Git and Per­force together today, you’ll likely be look­ing at the git-p4 fea­ture of Git as either a tool or a start­ing point. So to get you a lit­tle fur­ther along the road, we’ll be mak­ing an increased effort on git-p4 in the com­ing months. Here’s where you can give us a hand: let­ting us know what’s impor­tant to you in a git-p4 fea­ture set. Please add your sug­ges­tions to the com­ments below! [p4 blog]

I just started try­ing out git-p4 yes­ter­day for a very small inter­nal tool, so this is really good news. As a CM Engi­neer, I pretty much live in Per­force, but it’s a bit awk­ward for work­ing on small inter­nal tools where I might want to have sev­eral exper­i­men­tal branches. I’m quite new to git, but I’ve already found that its capa­bil­ity for that sort of work more than lives up to the hype.

Ana­lyst: Only one in ten tablets sold has a cel­lu­lar con­nec­tion. It’s clear that peo­ple are will­ing to pay for new tablets, but it’s also clear that they aren’t yet ready to take on the fee for cel­lu­lar con­nec­tiv­ity to their tablets. [Mac­Cen­tral]

Per­son­ally, I don’t care about the fee, but I refuse to vol­un­teer to carry a track­ing and sur­veil­lance device around with me. The idea that I’d pay to carry one is just insulting.

Seen in a job list­ing on Craigslist:

Knowl­edge of C+ and Visual Basics is required.

[…]

A cer­ti­fied Micro Soft pro­gram­mer is pre­ferred but not required.

For some­one who wants to work for peo­ple with such an impres­sive degree of tech­ni­cal illit­er­acy that they prob­a­bly think their CD drive is a cup holder.