Things that were not immediately obvious to me

Accounting can be a little counterintuitive. It’s important that the accounts sum to zero, but the question of how credits and debits are assigned to a transaction can be a little obscure. For instance, if you’re purchasing a long-term asset, you:

• debit your asset account
• credit your bank account

and if you’re depreciating an asset, you:

• debit your depreciation expense account
• credit your accumulated depreciation/contra asset account

in other words, as you accumulate cash, or assets, or expenses, you debit the accounts tracking those things. As you accumulate liabilities or income, you credit the accounts tracking those things.

The key is that, contrary to what you might expect, “credit” means “to take away from”, and “debit” means “to add to” (well, sort of, to a first approximation, for asset and expense accounts, at any rate). Wikipedia has a passable explanation.

**Boom!**

“Success! Twenty mines, twenty squirrels!”

UIWebViews are an easy way to embed a web browser into your application. You can also use them to perform (what I think is) a neat trick by assigning a UIWebView instance a delegate which implements webView:shouldStartLoadWithRequest:navigationType:.

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Some random thoughts on Twitter.

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Chapter 1 of David Maurer’s “The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man” (TBC) is entitled “A Word About Confidence Men”. This chapter offers a brief overview of the nature of con men and con games. Its greatest message is that, whatever their differences in detail, all con games are essentially the same.

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It’s time to start a new book! I hope you weren’t too much looking forward to “Rules for Radicals”, because I’ve decided to put that one off for now, and instead go with David Maurer’s “The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man” (TBC). TBC is a study of the “long con” as it was practiced during its “Golden Age”, the peak of which ran from 1914 – 1923. Today I’m just going to introduce the book, and talk a bit about why I think it’s worth reading.

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When you submit an app to AAPL’s iTunes App Store, you’re asked:

Export laws require that products containing encryption be properly authorized for export.

Failure to comply could result in severe penalties.

…

Does your product contain encryption?

Ever wonder what happens if you answer “yes”? Well, about 45 days of paperwork happens, according to the nice folks at Zetetic who’ve laid out a roadmap to the process of getting your app approved for export.

Since it can take 1-2 weeks to even open the account required to submit a request for export authorization, it’s probably a good idea to get started as soon as you begin to think that you might one day include encryption in your product. And, according to this guy, even using SSL might count (he was waiting to hear back from an export compliance specialist @AAPL when the blog post ended) as “including encryption”.

There are a lot of blogs out there, and most of them die young. That doesn’t mean they’re not entertaining. For instance, here’s a blog that seems to have only gotten a single post, but it’s an interesting one: an analysis of David Copperfield’s “Portal” illusion.

Here’s some video of the trick (valid until Copperfield’s lawyers find it, I suppose):

When I began writing about “The Prince”, I mentioned that I thought it would be interesting to see if it would yield any insights into the fall of Pablo Escobar. Well, with the benefit of hindsight, and given that there are so many points made in “The Prince”, of course it can. It’s a bit silly, really, but here are some of the ideas from “The Prince” illustrated by Escobar’s life.

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I’m a bit under the weather, so all I’ve got today is a quick set of useful co-ordinates. They are: (47, 159).

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