Fascinating (almost unbelievable) discussion / explanation of entropy as it relates to psuedo-random number generation over at Matt’s tumblr.
I honestly thought gpg was having a laugh when it told me to “wiggle the mouse” before it would spit out a sufficiently random key.
I just finished my tax return for 2010. Once again, eTax is povided as a windows-only program that doesn’t work in WINE. Below is the feedback I gave to the ATO when they asked for feedback, I suggest you send something similar if you care about not having to use windows:
The major cause of my dissatisfaction is that etax requires that I maintain a copy of microsoft windows on my computer, that I boot up once a year. This is not acceptable (at least I have a legit copy of windows, many australians do not); the software should be available either online or in a client that works on at least windows, mac and linux.
It doesn’t even work in WINE, which I futilely try every year in the hope that it has magically started working. It never does.
I rated myself as “extremely dissatisfied”, and yet also indicated that I will still use eTax next year. I wonder if that makes them more or less likely to fix it - on the one hand, all of the options are awful. On the other hand, I do still manage to make use of eTax every year…
People keep saying that RSS is dead at the hands of twitter and facebook, and I sincerely hope they’re wrong (or at least an insane minority). I find the following quite shocking, from an (obviously biased) review of flipboard:
Some might wonder why RSS isn’t used. That will be a limitation for some people, especially if you are trying to follow a blogger who doesn’t yet put their stuff into Twitter (naughty!) In reality, though, there is so much that IS on Twitter or Facebook that this limitation isn’t that big a deal. If you find some cool blog you can Tweet it and then it’ll show up in Flipboard anyway.
It’s amazing to think that people find twitter a better source of content than RSS, but at least all is not lost: readtwit gives you an RSS feed where whenever someone you follow posts a link, you get an RSS item with the content of the tweet, followed by the content of the page that was linked to.
update: Hilariously, about a week after I posted this readtwit announced that they were shutting down. I’m tempted to write my own replacement in google appengine…
…a continuation (hah!) of defer: Taming asynchronous javascript with coffeescript.
In my last post, I outlined the ideas behind defer and its current state. One of the things I mentioned is that how to deal with return statements in asynchronous code is not yet decided. I’d like to explore a few of those ideas here. If you haven’t read the previous post, I suggest that you do.
defer is something I’ve been working towards in various fashions for many months now. It’s a way of writing asynchronous javascript in a more straightforward and synchronous-looking way. My current approach has been to modify the CoffeeScript compiler to introduce a defer keyword. There is currently some debate on the issue (parts one and two have even more history) as to whether the functionality is necessary, useful or appropriate. Here, I hope to show the reasons behind the idea, why it does what it does, and how it helps programmers write more concise and readable code.
So apparently iPhone OS 4 (or iOS, as it’s now awkwardly named), still has no way to sync data in the background. “Multitasking done right” indeed.
To be clear, that means that for every application that syncs data with the web, you must explicitly open it (and maybe tap some buttons) to initiate a sync. If you have a third-party mail client, an RSS reader, a todo list and instapaper, that’s quite a lot of tedium to go through every time you want to sync data. Heaven forbid you have more than a handful of apps that might need to talk to the internet without your explicit direction.
Get over your ego, Apple, and just copy android properly next time.