Mark Twain famously wrote:
Give a man a reputation as an early riser, and that man can sleep till noon.
Which, if you can get the former, is all well and good. But what if you’re unlucky, and have to deal with an unfavorable reputation? I would suggest that not only is it futile to argue about it, it’s not even productive to try to disprove it through action.
Frustrated, Tom finally read the manual.
In a perfect world, we could create software that gave instant responses to user input. Unfortunately, this is not always feasible; some things take time, and so we have to keep the user waiting. There are some broadly-accepted conventions as to how to do this politely:
Today, I’d like to present some tips on how to follow these conventions on the iPhone.
From Arnold Kling, via The Corner:
There are two ways to approach reducing the use of high-cost, low-benefit procedures. You can have the government tell people what they can and cannot have. Or you can have individuals pay for a larger fraction of the medical procedures that they consume. It really comes down to those choices.
Let’s assume that Kling is correct, and that this is an exhaustive list of choices, and that “something must be done”. Which choice would you prefer to implement? (I think that’s an interesting and potentially revealing question.)
Chapter 5 of David Maurer’s “The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man” (TBC) consists of a discussion of “The Mob”. This chapter describes the internal organization (such as it was) of a big-con mob in the early 1900’s. It includes some interesting information on the financial arrangements of such a mob, as well as some insights into the highly specialized nature of con men.
Sleeping late seemed the best revenge.
There’s an interesting line in this Slate article, discussing the Austin kamikaze:
Sure, it may look like greed to keep 100 percent of your paycheck, but Stack was doing it all for us!
This little remark is in the service of a larger, possibly valid, point, but I want to focus on the small-scale question of greed.
I pulled together all my Full-Text Search articles into a single page. And lest you think that I’m just padding out the blog with recycled content, let me add that I fixed a bug in the demo project. (It used to include a reference to an Icon.png file that I had removed.)
And here’s a Dinosaur Comic that I find particularly amusing.
Robert’s girlfriend quickly searched his phone.
I don’t know how to access the filesystem on my iPhone from my desktop. I can write apps that talk to their sandboxed parts of the filesystem just fine, but I don’t know how to reach into arbitrary parts of the iPhone’s filesystem from my desktop and move files around. This can be inconvenient when developing and testing code. I have developed a workaround, however, which I’d like to talk about.
