Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Sometimes, the good guys win. Today, simply because this election was held, it looks like Honduran democrats won, and the Chavez proxies lost. Good deal.

I recently saw this story on Slashdot about “Revolution 4.0“, which claims to make programmers more productive by providing an “easy English-like language” in which to write code. This sort of thing strikes me as profoundly wrong-headed, and I’d like to present an analogy to try to explain why.

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Today we look at the fourth chapter of Niccolo Machiavelli’s “The Prince“. This chapter explains “Why the Kingdom of Darius, Occupied by Alexander, Did Not Rebel Against the Successors of the Latter After His Death”, and seems directly relevant to modern events in Afghanistan and Iraq.

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A quick warning about the insertSections:withRowAnimation: method of UITableView. If you insert a section with this function inside a beginUpdates/endUpdates block, you should not insert rows into that section (with insertRowsAtIndexPaths:withRowAnimation:) inside the same begin/end block. Somewhat confusingly, the first row insertion appears to work correctly, but subsequent ones tend to crash the program. Caveat insertor.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

(Yes, this is from Ulysses; Mezzo Cammin is something else entirely.)

Today we look at the third chapter of Niccolo Machiavelli’s “The Prince“. This chapter is “Of Mixed Monarchies”, and discusses some of the questions which arise when a prince annexes a new territory to his possessions. It is the first non-trivial chapter in the book, and introduces some of the thought-provoking concepts for which it is known.

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The second chapter of Niccolo Machiavelli’s “The Prince” is “Of Hereditary Monarchies”. N.M. really has only one point to make in this chapter: Once a people becomes accustomed to the idea of rule by a particular family, inertia will help to keep that family in power, and even to help them regain it should they be deposed. (Parallels with the Kennedys are left as an exercise for the reader.)

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Paul Graham discusses Apple’s iPhone App Store approval process in his latest essay. I think it’s fair to summarize the core of his piece as:

• The App Store approval process is opaque and frustrating
• Its bad design is driven by AAPL’s perception that they own the channel between developers and users – AAPL is essentially trying to act as a “software publisher”
• 80’s companies like VisiCorp showed that software publishing makes no sense
• AAPL’s review process is also incompatible with launch-fast-and-iterate development, which is the way of the future
• By annoying its developers, AAPL is (to some extent) undermining its future

I think this essay overlooks some important things.

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Okay, so, yeah: XKCD. The mouseover text for that one reads:

Some engineer out there has solved P=NP and it’s locked up in an electric eggbeater calibration routine. For every 0x5f375a86 we learn about, there are thousands we never see.

This is a reference to a neat floating point hack, to which I provide some references below.

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Today we look at the first chapter of Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince. This is an extremely short chapter (even by the standards of “The Prince”) that simply lays out “The Various Kinds of Government and the Ways by Which They Are Established” as N.M. sees them.

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