YTechnology

Back in the day when Palm handhelds ruled, the major app stores were PalmGear and Handango. While it's become common knowledge the cut Apple takes from its App Store, the cut taken by PalmGear and Handango wasn't as well known. Regardless, we developers weren't exactly happy then either.

Comparing Apple to Palm risks comparing apples to oranges, but there are insights to be had. While the App Store is part of Apple, PalmGear and Handango were simply online software stores, and were not affiliated with the device makers Palm and HandSpring. Developers were free to sell elsewhere online, but PalmGear and Handango pulled in the majority of clicks. Unfortunately, these stores were as entrepreneurial as the developers and behaved like a startup -- that is, they spent aggressively for rapid growth. As a result, what started as a 30% cut slowly rose to 35% to 40%, with talk of 50%. And to make matters more painful, some developers were paid late.
I soon set up my own website and…

I'll take hexadecimal addresses for $200.

Answer: Hex B000
Question: What is the starting video address for the IBM monochrome display.

I'll take hexadecimal addresses for $400.

Answer: Hex B800
Question: What is the starting video address for the IBM graphics display.

August 12th marks the 39th anniversary of the IBM PC, making it a good time for a nostalgic look at Peter Norton's book, Inside the IBM PC. Before computers became personal, they were large machines housed in refrigerated rooms and guarded by stern, but good wizards in the tradition of Gandalf or Dumbledore. The PC, in contrast, sat on my desk, and without a gatekeeper, allowed me to explore, experiment, and crash the machine to my heart's content. Norton served as an excellent guide, and while the contents are mostly the stuff of trivia today, the book opened up a new world for me back then.

Of course there were other personal computers from that era, such as the Timex Sinclair, the Commodore 64, and t…

Before the personal computer, there were minicomputers and mainframes. I understood them as large machines housed in refrigerated rooms and guarded by stern, but good, wizards (system administrators). The personal computer changed that. With a PC at home and sitting on my desk, the internals -- cpu, memory, graphics card, and disk drive -- became accessible. It was a revelation.

Reading The Deficit Myth gave me that same revelatory feeling, although in the field of economics. Before Dr. Stephanie Kelton's book, I understood that deficits were bad, while balanced budgets were good. That is, the government should manage its money like a household: spend only what you can afford, and avoid debt. The household budget approach was relatable, and sounded right. But there were nagging inconsistencies that a household budget approach could not explain. If deficits were bad, how did they successfully fund the space race to put a man on the moon? Or pay for wars (necessary or not)? How did…

I first shared my enthusiasm for dark mode in the post Automate Dark Mode in Apple OS Mojave.  Not everyone likes dark mode though, and Victoria Song of Gizmodo recently wrote a light hearted essay to Stop Using Dark Mode. She made some fair points.  Color themes for light mode have been around longer and their designs have had more time to evolve; the result is superior contrast and better readability than their dark mode counterparts.

I've also found dark mode limitations in Apple's Mail App. While Mail is dark mode capable, html email is rendered in light mode and the harsh contrast is painful to the eyes.

Where dark mode shines is when I'm using one application exclusively such as Xcode or Android Studio. The colors are consistent, and free of competing themes, the experience is immersive and harmonious.

Discussions of inefficiency continue to trend. I contributed with the post The Hidden Cost Of Efficiency, where resiliency is inversely proportional to efficiency.   …

When you order a new refrigerator, you:

a) measure the space it will occupy and you walk the delivery path to check the width and height of doorways, hallways, and entry ways.

b) OMG! Take the front door off its hinges!!

c) disassemble the refrigerator outside, and reassemble it inside.

Any answer other than "a" would suggest that you are possibly an overworked programmer who doesn't check boundary conditions.

It would also put you in the same company as the programmers who allowed a killer wallpaper to brick certain Android phones. When installed, this wallpaper would send the phone into an infinite loop, causing it to crash, restart, and then crash again. Even safe mode could not break the cycle.

YouTube tech reviewer, Mrwhosetheboss, played detective in this video, pursuing what he first suspected as malware, but then realizing it to be something more mysterious. He even bricked his own phone in the process.


In the end, it came down to one faulty pixel where the calcu…

After parking your car, you:

a) engage the parking brake
b) engage the parking brake only if you are on a hill
c) what’s a parking brake?

Any answer other than "a" suggests that you, as a programmer, don't park your pointers after you free them.

ZDNet recently published a couple of articles about Chrome and Microsoft, reporting that 70% of all their security bugs were memory safety issues. That weighty number was made heavier coming from companies where resources are abundant and developers are first class citizens. I can only imagine the bug count is higher in companies where budgets are tight and developers are support staff.

The article continued, describing C and C++ as "memory unsafe" languages, and attributing hackers with increasingly sophisticated attacks.  I even found myself reconsidering my Symmetry post, where I insisted memory can be managed if you cared enough:

common mistakes such as memory leaks and buffer overruns . . . are overstated, and can …