By now, you’ve certainly heard about Siri. It’s a very cool piece of tech. So cool, in fact, that I think it represents a big leap for Apple. The narrative we got from Phil Schiller is that for years, the programmers have taunted users with the dream of voice recognition technology that actually works, and […]
A common meme around the anti-copyright tech scene (TechDirt, TorrentFreak) is that music companies need to compete with free and they are mostly shooting themselves in the foot by setting up silly barriers to music consumption. Well, they’re right. But here’s the deeper reality–they’re more right than even they realize. When Spotify launched in the US, piracy […]
I’d like to review a few things you may have been taught in high school civics class. First of all, Thomas Jefferson was a liberal. “Liberal” policies included: Laissez-faire capitalism, unregulated trade, Wealth of Nations Limited government, strict constitutionalism Strong private property and ownership rights Thomas Jefferson is widely heralded as one of the spiritual […]
Remember those jokes about studying by osmosis back in undergrad? Put the textbook under your pillow and learn in your sleep! That was a funny joke, at least the first time, right? Right? It turns out the whole world runs on the same principle behind “learning by osmosis”. “We have this problem, let’s do something totally arbitrary and […]
As part of a not-so-secret project, I’m writing a python script to make git commits on my behalf. I’d like these commits to be made “from” a different user. GitHub in fact has a page on multiple SSH key usage, which makes the entire process look deceptively simple. Just create an alternate domain name and […]
Have you ever sworn that you commited feature X, but now can’t find it? git log shows nothing? It’s possible that you committed them while you had a detached head. Oops. And it turns out that not even “git log –all”, you know, shows you all: –all: Pretend as if all the refs in $GIT_DIR/refs/ […]
Here’s the job of a CEO: to make money. To spend less than revenues. That’s it. It’s really that simple. Everything else is the how of doing that–how to cut costs, how to drive revenue, whether to worry about the short-term or the long-term, etc. The perception, though, is a lot different. Stereotypically, the CEO is […]
It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time before software. If you wanted to do your taxes, you would ask your accountant; if you wanted to know how many people lived in Austin you would ask your librarian; if you wanted to back up your business records you got a photocopier and some […]
I’m afraid that this post is a little longwinded, and I take a long time to arrive at my point. I hope you will stick with me, as I think it is a valuable insight. It just takes some time to get there. There are two ways to deal with bugs. The first way is […]
It seems like every time a new feature gets checked in, somebody fails to add it to the test target, and I get a linker error like this one: Apple Mach-O Linker (ld) Error: _OBJC_CLASS_$_CLASSNAME referenced from… The solution to this is not to just keep adding files to the test target. If you compile […]