Lots of blogs are abuzz today with the story of an Egyptian Abdallah Higazy, who confessed to being involved with the 9/11 attacks even though he was completely innocent. You may remember the story, summarized as follows:
The long and the short of it was that an Egpytian national, Abdallah Higazy, was staying in [...]
New York Times columnist Paul Krugman blogs his rejection of New York Times book reviewer David Kennedy’s negative review of Krugman’s new book.
Update: To clarify, the reviewer doesn’t work for the Times, he’s a Stanford history professor.
I worked out the design issue that I mentioned yesterday, and learned a few things in the process. The most helpful thing I encountered were the three most recent screencasts from Railscasts, which Jason Perkins pointed me toward.
As an aside, if you’re not using screencasts to augment your learning, you’re really missing out. I think [...]
John Gruber speculates on the forthcoming details of the iPhone SDK and makes the following remark with regard to security:
And the hysteria over the iPhone’s current “everything runs as root” situation is overblown. Applications on your Mac don’t run as the root; they run under your user account. But all of your data [...]
I’m running into a bit of a conundrum when it comes to designing objects in a Ruby on Rails application, and thought I’d toss it up here for discussion. I have an application with two persistent objects, User and Address. Address is a child of user, and user holds a pointer to their current address [...]
Why is the iPhone a closed platform? Even though Apple is going to allow third party applications next year, it’s apparent that they’re going to exercise some control over who’s allowed to deploy applications for the iPhone and what those applications will be allowed to do. The degree of control Apple will exercise remains [...]
Apple has announced that they’ll be releasing an SDK for the iPhone in February. There’s talk of digital signatures and no talk of how much the SDK will cost, so we still have no idea whether open source software for the iPhone will be legitimately allowed or will be for outlaws only. I’m sure you’ll [...]
Blogger Peter Calveley petitioned the US Patent office to look at Amazon.com’s one-click patent again, and this time they rejected nearly all of its claims. That patent has always struck me as particularly egregious, but it also turned out to be tough to get rid of. It was awarded back in 1999, and a lot [...]
The New York Times is releasing open source software. Their database abstraction package, DBSlayer looks innovative, clever, useful, and deceptively simple. One of the things I love most about the rise of open source is that it has given organizations a framework to show off the creativity that dwells inside their walls. Companies have always [...]
I’m working on a couple of different Ruby on Rails applications which have me thinking about testing. One has an insufficient number of tests, and the other has no tests at all.
Why write unit tests?
The first thing I’ve come to realize is the degree to which I depend on unit tests in getting my job [...]