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rants

The EFF managed to get one of the FISC court rulings declassified: NSA’s targeting and minimization procedures, as the government proposes to apply them to MCTs as to which the “active user” is not known to the a tasked selector, are inconsistent with the requirements of the Fourth Amendment. However, there is one point of […]

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I’ve had an unusual number of interesting conversations spin out of my previous article documenting that mobile web apps are slow.  This has sparked some discussion, both online and IRL.  But sadly, the discussion has not been as… fact-based as I would like. So what I’m going to do in this post is try to […]

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This article is now in Russian! Hey guys. Thanks for coming to this meeting on such short notice. There’s coffee in the back. Did somebody spot the token recruiter yet? And show him the door? Okay thanks, now it’s just us. So I’ve called this meeting because: we’ve got a problem. This programming thing is […]

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Of course, we all know that DRM is broken and bad.  But until very recently, I’ve been persuaded by sort of an economic argument.  I’ll let cynicalkane explain it to you: The market problem is that people want to consume expensive art. There is billions of dollars of interest in making this market clear. The […]

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Every so often I run into people who tell me that web apps have gotten a bit of an unfair reputation–“they can be just as good as native apps!” they tell me.  (Usually the “bad” reputation is the work of some villain hell-bent on walled-garden-domination.) For example, there are blog posts like this one from […]

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Here’s what I keep reading: With distributed version control, merges are easy and work fine. So you can actually have a stable branch and a development branch, or create long-lived branches for your QA team where they test things before deployment, or you can create short-lived branches to try out new ideas and see how […]

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An experiment: this blog post is available in audio form, for playing along or listening later.   Listen later Every good story has a protagonist.  And if you are writing or reading a story, whether it is a news story or a work of fiction, one of the important questions is “who’s the protagonist”?  Who […]

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James Coglan published an article the other day about how node.js missed the boat with promises.  I don’t know much about node.js, but I do know about promises. And they didn’t miss much of a boat. So I’m an iOS developer, and for reasons outside the scope of this blog post, you have a lot […]

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UPDATE: THIS BLOG POST IS NOW OUT OF DATE. It is, in fact, possible, to install Windows on an external disk on modern Macs. For an updated treatment of this topic, for Macs roughly 2013-and-later, see here. However for macs much earlier than that, this information still applies, and is preserved for historical reasons. Continuing […]

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I don’t understand Fake Inbox Zero.  It’s the idea that your inbox should always have zero messages.  As distinct from Actual Inbox Zero: “It’s about how to reclaim your email, your atten­tion, and your life. That “zero?” It’s not how many mes­sages are in your inbox–it’s how much of your own brain is in that […]

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