Linked List: July 19, 2007

Thursday, 19 July 2007

Fraser Speirs: ‘A Subversion User Looks at Git’ ★

Git’s suddenly getting a bit of attention from Mac developers — Michael Tsai wrote about it last week. Speirs has a good observation about one of the advantages to Git’s simpler file system layout:

There’s one .git directory at the root of the repository and absolutely nothing else. Anyone who has had to check RTFd files into Subversion and then edit those files with TextEdit will be cheering right about now. For those who haven’t, understand that RTFd files are actually bundles, and bundles are directories. Thus, Subversion adds a .svn directory inside your RTFd file. When TextEdit saves this file, the .svn directory is lost and the file appears disconnected from its history.

Keyboard Maestro 2.1 ★

Universal binary support for one of my favorite utilities.

Buzz Andersen: Three Weeks with the iPhone ★

It’s amazing how consistent iPhone reviews have been, both regarding what’s great and where it falls short.

Duke University vs. iPhone ★

I keep seeing wire service stories about iPhones supposedly being responsible for bringing down Duke University’s campus-wide Wi-Fi network, but I have yet to see a single technical explanation for how this might be possible. Why aren’t iPhones bringing down anyone else’s network, if they’re to blame?

Update: This NetworkWorld article has some additional details, but it’s still far short of a complete explanation. (Thanks to Dan Kurtz.)

Checkmate for Checkers ★

Nature:

Jonathan Schaeffer and his team at the University of Alberta, Canada, have been working on their program, called Chinook, since 1989, running calculations on as many as 200 computers simultaneously. Schaeffer has now announced that they have solved the game of American checkers, which is played on an 8 by 8 board and is also known as English draughts.

I’ve been working on a side project to do the same thing with tic-tac-toe. (Thanks to Jesper.)

Piper Jaffray Analysts: AT&T Sharing Revenue With Apple ★

Speculation, but I suspect something like this is true.

Guardian Interview With ‘Helvetica’ Director Gary Hustwit ★

Gary Hustwit, in an interview with Andrew Dickson:

“When I started this project, I couldn’t believe that a film like this didn’t exist already, because these people are gods and goddesses. What they do is more than just logos and corporate branding - they design the type that we read every day in newspapers and magazines, onscreen and on television. Fonts don’t just appear out of Microsoft Word: there are human beings and huge stories behind them.”

David Maynor Is Not LMH ★

So someone posted a message to several computer security mailing lists, ostensibly from David Maynor, wherein he revealed himself as LMH, the pseudonymous hacker behind The Month of Apple Bugs, among other exploits.

This message was a spoof. Maynor, on his own weblog, disavows it, and correctly chastises anyone who took these messages at face value without verifying that it wasn’t a spoof. Anyone can send an email message “from” a fake name, claiming any crazy thing. That The Register ran with this without verification is appalling, even by The Register’s already low standards.

iPhones Nearly Everywhere, iPhone Stories Exceed Those of Harry Potter So Far ★

Carl D. Howe:

Only 10 Apple stores out of 165 are out of stock of iPhones today. With five new Apple stores opening this weekend (presumably with iPhone stocks pre-planned), we may be looking at the best weekend for iPhone availability since the iPhone launch.

Worth a bookmark: Howe’s iPhone availability map.