Linked List: May 16, 2014

Friday, 16 May 2014

Stop Forcing People to Wear Bike Helmets 

Joseph Stromberg, writing for Vox:

For most bikers, this advice is anathema. The importance of wearing a helmet has been drilled into everyone since childhood. And, it’s true that, as study after study has shown, you’re better off with a helmet if you’re in an accident.

But in the world’s most popular biking cities, particularly in Europe, very few bikers wear helmets. And there are good reasons for that: biking, it turns out, isn’t an especially dangerous form of transportation in terms of head trauma. And the benefits of helmets may be overstated. While they do protect your head during accidents, there’s some evidence that helmets make it more likely you’ll get in an accident in the first place.

‘/Users’ Folder Bug Botches Permissions in Addition to Visibility 

Rich Trouton:

The permissions on the /Users folder were also changed to be world-writable, so that anyone could read and write to the /Users folder.

After considerable investigation by the folks in the ##osx-server IRC room, it looks like the issue has been tied to two causes:

  1. iTunes 11.2 being installed

  2. iCloud’s Find My Mac being enabled.

That’s a pretty bad permissions bug. Trouton has a script that fixes all the damage (restore visibility to /Users and /Users/Shared, then run Repair Permissions), but note that you must turn off Find My Mac, or it will just happen all over again when you restart.

Iconfactory.com Redesign 

Nice typography and responsive design.

Dan Rubin on iPhone Photography 

The Guardian:

Dan Rubin, editor-at-large of the Photographic Journal and an early Instagram adopter, takes a tour of London to test some of the best smartphone photography apps. By shooting a variety of people and places, Dan shows how using some specially selected apps throughout your photography workflow can dramatically improve the shots you capture — and offers some cool tips and tricks of what you can do with those shots afterwards.

Great advice, including technique and app recommendations.

Breathing City 

Beautiful animated map by Joey Cherdarchuk showing Manhattan’s work and home population hour-by-hour.

The Curious Case of the Hidden ‘/Users’ Folder in OS X 10.9.3 

Kirk McElhearn:

Yesterday, I showed how you could unhide the /Users folder in OS X 10.9.3, the latest update to OS X that was released yesterday. Yet many users, in comments, emails and on Twitter, have pointed out that their /Users folder is not hidden. Here, it’s hidden on both my Macs: a late 2011 Mac mini, and an early 2013 MacBook Pro.

It really doesn’t make sense for this folder to be hidden; it contains the /Users/Shared folder, which you may want to use to provide files to other users, since all users can access it. My guess, given that not everyone sees the /Users folder as hidden, is that this is a bug; one way or another. In other words, it should either not be hidden, or it should be hidden for everyone.

Sounds like a bug to me too. In the meantime, the best workaround I’ve seen is Dave Mark’s idea to make an alias.

Translation From Polite British Spokesperson-ese to Plain English Regarding Samsung’s Rebranding of Heathrow Terminal 5 

Vlad Savov, The Verge:

Samsung’s marketing juggernaut is reaching new heights today with the announcement that Heathrow’s Terminal 5 will be rebranded for two weeks to promote the company’s flagship Galaxy S5 Android phone. Starting on Monday, every area of the terminal will feature the “Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5” moniker, with all the signage and digital screens promoting the handset and projecting images of it. Russell Taylor, Samsung’s UK marketing VP describes this as a “one-off opportunity to push the boundaries like no other brand has been allowed to do before.” A Heathrow Airport spokesperson clarifies that Samsung hasn’t bought the actual naming rights to the terminal, just an expansive ad campaign to be distributed within it. She says “Samsung want to call it Terminal Samsung Galaxy S5 and we are relaxed about that.”

Translation: “We’re every bit as appalled as you are by the crass nature of this, but holy shit you should see how much money they’re paying us. Pass the gin.”

Apple Integrates LLVM Compiler to Boost WebKit JavaScript Performance 

Peter Bright, writing for Ars Technica:

The LLVM-based fourth tier is called FTL, for Fourth Tier LLVM (and, of course, faster than light). It shares some portions with the third stage, since the third stage already does important work for handling JavaScript’s dynamic nature, but has a different code generating portion.

The result is a healthy performance boost. FTL produces code that is more than 40 times faster than the interpreter, with benchmarks taking about a third less time to run than the old three tier system.

It’s pretty clever: the new FTL compiler takes longer to compile the code, but the code it generates runs much faster. But while the FTL compiler is working, WebKit will execute code generated by the (faster-to-compile) existing JIT compiler, then switch over to the FTL-generated code when it’s ready.

Lots of details in the official announcement on the Surfin’ Safari blog.