Linked List: April 23, 2008

Wednesday, 23 April 2008

iPhone SDK Beta 4 

The betas are coming quickly, and there are a bunch of improvements already over what was released initially last month. If you’re a registered ADC developer (which is free), you can see the release notes here.

Macworld’s Live Coverage of Apple Finance Call 

Dan Moren and Jason Snell are providing live coverage of today’s financial results conference call.

Apple Reports Record Second Quarter Results: $1.05 Billion in Profit 

Highlights, with comparisons to the year-ago quarter:

  • $1.05 billion in profit, up from $770 million.
  • Just under 2.3 million Macs sold — representing 51 percent unit growth and 54 percent revenue growth.
  • 10.6 million iPods sold, up 1 percent (but 6 percent revenue-wise).
  • 1.7 million iPhones sold.
Coding Horror: ‘Behold WordPress, Destroyer of CPUs’ 

Jeff Atwood on the out-of-the-box performance of WordPress:

I’m not alone; just do a web search on WordPress CPU usage or WordPress Digg Effect and you’ll find page after page of horror stories, most (all?) of which are solved by the swift and judicious application of the WP-Cache plugins.

It’s not like this is a new issue. Personally, I think it’s absolutely irresponsible that WP-Cache like functionality isn’t already built into WordPress. I would not even consider deploying WordPress anywhere without it. And yet, according to a recent podcast, Matt Mullenweg dismisses it out of hand and hand-wavingly alludes to vague TechCrunch server reconfigurations.

It’s baffling that a default WordPress installation doesn’t offer any caching. Almost every time I knock a site offline by linking to it from DF, it’s a WordPress site without caching.

Negative Energy 

Web development expert Mike Arrington, last week on Twitter, regarding why he blocked someone from his feed for sending him a correction to something he posted on the supposedly-widely-read-but-doesn’t-actually-send-much-traffic-at-all-when-they-link-to-you TechCrunch:

I block when all they do is send negative energy my way. more details in my post. [Lowercase sic.]

Today on TechCrunch:

It doesn’t really matter if Twitter’s Chief Architect Blaine Cook was fired or resigned. The important thing is that he’s gone now, and this gives Twitter the opportunity to hire someone (or a team) who may actually be able to scale the nearly two year old service and keep it live.

P.A. Semi Chips Not Suited for iPhones and iPods? 

Beyond3D looks at the power consumption and concludes that Apple’s P.A. Semi acquisition has nothing to do with future (or at least not near-future) iPhones and iPods:

The company’s dual-core processor, which is manufactured on a 65nm process (likely at IBM), sports typical power consumption of 5 to 13W at 2GHz. Even if shrunk to 45nm, stripped of its second core, synthesized for a lower target frequency, and binned even more aggressively for power efficiency. It’d still be take substantially too much power for a mobile phone. The idle power consumption of 1W would also need to be reduced by more than two orders of magnitude.

Timeframe 

Very nicely-done open source calendar widget for web developers by Stephen Celis. Timeframe supports a very smooth click-and-drag method for selecting a range of dates — prepare to be impressed if you try the demo.

YouTube: ‘Stephen Fry and the Gutenberg Press’ 

Crackerjack hour-long BBC program on Gutenberg’s movable type printing press, hosted by Stephen Fry. Goes great with this aforelinked bookmarklet that lets you download higher-quality MP4 video files from YouTube. I moved those MP4s over to the old Apple TV and enjoyed the program as it was meant to be seen — ass on couch and beer in hand.

Update: A higher-quality version via BitTorrent at The Pirate Bay.

Apple Buys P.A. Semi, a CPU Design Company 

Forbes:

“Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not comment on our purposes and plans,” said Apple spokesman Steve Dowling. He declined to comment on the value of the deal, which a person familiar with the deal suggested was done for $278 million in cash.

They specialize in low-power high-performance processors — the sort of chips Apple might use in future iPhones and iPods. Interesting contrast with Sony’s purchase of Gracenote yesterday, which was for about the same amount of money.

Patriots Still Pursuing Perfection 

The Smoking Gun:

Three months after their bid for an undefeated season ended with a Super Bowl loss to the New York Giants, the New England Patriots are continuing to pursue trademarks on the phrases “19-0” and “19-0 The Perfect Season”, records show.