There's an excellent article, Keeping Secrets, on medium today (originally from the November/December 2014 issue of Stanford Magazine) about the conflict between academic work on cryptography and the NSA's role in national security.   Most of the focus is on what happened and not on who was right or wrong.

If you have interest at all in 1980's "culture", the tech industry, and/or the movie Real Genius, you should check out the iMore Review program Review 16: Real Genius.
Don Melton, Matt Drance, Guy English, and Rene Ritchie do a great job of running down the highs and lows of this classic.

When digging around for information about Apple's new Caching Server, I happened across this informative article about Caching Server for Mavericks by Dan Barrett.   Definitely worth a read if you're interested in finding out how to make the most of your network connection wth your Macs.

Matt Gemmell penned a great piece on User Interface design and evolution as it relates to, well, a lot of things. It's definitely worth the time to read Tail Wagging.

I'd never heard of World Backup Day before seeing an article about it in Wired today, but it sounds like a good idea, especially for those whose friends may partake in a little bit of the April Foolery tomorrow.

Launched just ahead of the first move by the US to switch from first-to-invent to first-to-file, a new site, FirsttoDisclose.org has launched, with the idea of putting your materials in the public view in order to limit other people from attempting to claim patent protection for ideas you are using.   I'm not a lawyer, but from what I can see, this is mostly useful for forcing ideas to be disclosed for public use (i.e. intent to eventually place in the public domain).

Hi folks.   We're back on the air with a new server and a new design.  Hopefully this less noisy design is a bit more paletable.   Any links to the old site will cease to function today, but there weren't many anyway (according to Google Webmaster Tools), but we have preserved all of the content.

My plan is to post more in 2013 than I did in 2012, which I believe I have already achieved by posting a single article.

Cheers for now, and set the new RSS feed to keep up to date.

I received a question this afternoon from my cousin about the amount of free flash in her MacBook Air and figured that the answer would probably be useful to others as well. Note that none of this is officially from Apple, so it might be wrong, but I have had quite a few SSDs and the vast majority of it is correct, or at least a jumping off point.

This is a note for those of us who might run into this problem. When working on some changes for Cartographica, I ran into some difficulty when using a verb-first command that could take either a list of one type of user-defined object or another type of user-defined object.

So with all the wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth over Adobe Flash in the last few days, I just wanted to make sure I got this little tidbit in. When it comes to user experience, Adobe just doesn't understand. Their "platform" of flash brings a mediocrity born of the Internet of 5-10 years ago into your browser window. Why? Because, with Flash you can build once and deploy everywhere.... Wait a second, wasn't that Java? Have you ever used a Java application? They just don't feel right on any platform and neither does Flash. My troubles today began when I headed over to the Adobe site to give them my bi-annual upgrade fee...