Sketches of Bits

I've been rather disappointed by Tumblr for quite some time and I have finally channelled this disappointment into migration.

My new Blog + Tumblr combination now lives at http://blog.iphoting.com/. RSS feed available at http://blog.iphoting.com/atom.xml.

Reasons for moving are plentiful. The greatest motivation is the unreliability of the service. Downtimes are frequent and sometimes long. Search never works. The API is flakey. The Amazon S3-backed image store has issues with posts over 2 years of age.

Simply put, I don't trust Tumblr.

Coding Horror:

Passphrases are clearly more usable than traditional "secure" passwords. They are also highly likely to be more secure. Even naive worst-case passphrases like "this is my password" aren't all that hackable, at least when compared to their single word equivalents, eg, "password".

NYTimes.com:

ARMS carve the air. A hand closes as if to pull taffy. An index finger shoots out. The torso leans in, leans back. And somehow, music pours forth — precisely coordinated and emotionally expressive — in response to this mysterious podium dance.

Facebook gave me an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the process it uses to deploy new functionality. I watched first-hand as the company’s release engineers rolled out the new “timeline” feature for brand pages.

TorrentFreak:

The Pirate Bay is not only the most visited BitTorrent site on the Internet, but arguably the most censored too. Many ISPs have been ordered to block their customers’ access to the website, and recently Microsoft joined in on the action by stopping people sharing its location with others. Microsoft’s Windows Live Messenger (MSN) now refuses to pass on links to The Pirate Bay website, claiming they are unsafe.

The Guardian:

ZDnet:

Remember the Nexus S? It was the Google flagship phone prior to the Galaxy Nexus. It’s not that old, it was the official Google phone until late last year and is still available for purchase. As a Google flagship phone, it was promised to get the Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) update shortly after it rolled out late last year. Nexus S owners are still waiting for it.

It took iOS just 15 days to get the same percentage of users on the latest OS version as are currently on any single version of Android.

Three weeks ago, I got a paid internship as a ruby hacker. I mentioned the Stanford classes during the interview and my interviewer had heard of them. I am no longer adrift without a career, in contrast to thousands of underemployed lawyers nationwide, banging their head against the wall, hoping for a miracle. At my internship, I have already committed code that is in production (despite never having written any ruby when I was hired). In the past 15 months I have learned enough that I was able to pick up ruby/padrino and start contributing quickly

But with Apple things are different. They don’t just use an ugly cardboard box with their logo and a few stickers slapped on it. They actually give a great deal of thought to the design of the box itself. They think about what it looks like on the shelf, how it presents the contents to the purchaser, and what the experience will be like when you open it.

The Economist:

It’s easy to see why developing countries might be seduced by Singapore’s recent success—but it’s also perfectly delusional of them. What many poorer countries seem to like about Singapore is that it seems to sell the quickest path—a short-cut, almost—to development. After all, wasn’t Singapore, now probably the world’s richest nation measured by wealth per capita, just a malarial swamp only a generation or two back? That’s what many people seem to believe.

Singapore’s ruling party of course does nothing to discourage the myth. The People’s Action Party (PAP) is anxious to take as much credit as it can for Singapore’s undoubted success. The title of one volume of founding-father Harry Lee Kuan Yew’s autobiography says it all—“From Third World to First: The Singapore Story”.

Asymco:

Today Apple announced both a dividend and a share re-purchase plan which, when combined, will consume 45% of Apple’s current US cash reserves.

The dividend will be $2.65/share/quarter and the buyback will cost $10 billion over three years. The dividend will therefore cost about $2.5 billion per quarter (starting next quarter) and the re-purchase will cost about $833 million per quarter (starting next fiscal year).

However, note that Apple’s cash has been growing far more quickly. It increased by $16 billion last quarter or $37 billion over the last year. This rate of increase is itself increasing.

…

This means Apple’s total cash should still grow by more than $35 billion this year.

TL;DR—Apple's cash inflow grows at an increasing rate, that even this cash dispersion strategy will not dampen.

So, it has come to this. They're earning so much money that they can't spend it anywhere else, and fast enough. While I'd think that Steve Jobs might disapprove of this measure, but after some thought, I think this move might actually take some pressure of managing such a huge cash-pile off the CFO's back.

In fact, it is said that Apple's CFO can probably be considered as a large hedge-fund manager.

Yahoo News:

Train operator SBS Transit has revealed it is unable to rule out any causes, including sabotage, until investigations are completed on the twin faults that caused an almost 11-hour disruption in services on the North East Line (NEL) on Thursday.

That's the first thing I thought when I saw pictures1 of snapped stainless steel support cables—sabotage.

If found to be true, it looks like there's an even bigger problem at hand.