The Pros and the Cons

The pros of having only one contractor per country that sells the iPhone are, as Tim Cook said in his talk at Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference, that it is simpler (for the customer) and simpler (for Apple) to offer inventions such as Visual Voicemail. I agree. Mostly. Partly. Potentially. Not at all.

In short, I’d say Apple likes its technology…

In short, I’d say Apple likes its technology open and its products closed.

Dear geeks, …

Let’s face it: There are numerous things the iPad does not do. Just as the iPod, it is bound to iTunes. Just as the iPhone, it is a closed environment. It’s Apple that decides what you are allowed to install, it’s not you. There is no stylus and no text recognition. There is multitasking in the iPad – but Apple does not allow third party developers to use it. You can not change the number of applications on the home screen. The iPad does not display your due appointments on its lock screen. There are more things it does not do than things it does do.

Code Readability FAIL

Fefe mentioned a change log entry of gzip 1.4:

Broken UI Design

As many do, german FAZ allows their readers to comment their articles on the website. The headings of the newest comments are shown right below the article. If you want to read more than the header, you have to click on the comments title.

bounding​Rect​With​Size:​options:​attributes:

NSString has the method bounding​Rect​With​Size:​options:​attributes: that does not quite do what one would expect. Most people expect it to return the size that you could use for draw​In​Rect:​with​Attributes:. These people are normally puzzled, what to use as Option for the options: parameter and they never figure out how to make bounding​Rect​With​Size:​options:​attributes: return the result for more than one line. Here’s the solution:

DVCS

Currently I use Subversion for my private projects. Aside from being central, I’m perfectly happy with Subversion: It supports file renames, automatically converts line endings, keeps track of directories – even empty ones, and adds meta data to each object. In comparison with other centralized version control systems, Subversion is what I – as one that rarely needs things like merging – dreamed of.

If you’re not proud of where you work, go…

If you’re not proud of where you work, go work somewhere else.

In Zeiten der Schweinegrippe

In Zeiten wie diesen müssen wir alle überlegen, wie wir das Ansteckungsrisiko minimieren können. Ich will niemanden dazu zwingen, sich einem unnötigen Risiko auszusetzen. Nicht einmal den Postboten, die in aller Herrgottsfrühe klingeln, nur um Werbung in die Briefkästen zu werfen. So ein Klingelknopf ist einfach zu gefährlich!

Compiling the compiler

Since release 4.3.0, the GNU compiler collection requires GMP and MPFR to compile the compiler. Instead of compiling these prerequirements before compiling gcc, it is simpler to create links to the sources inside the GNU CC source tree: