Today I’m going to take a look back at David Maurer’s “The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man” (TBC), and pick out those points which strike me as most interesting. I will focus primarily on those matters which have implications beyond the big con, as otherwise this piece would run too long.
Predictably, Dracula lost his libel suit.
A quick followup to an earlier post: Apparently, you do need to go through the whole CCATS process to ship an iPhone app that makes HTTPS connections – even if the app uses no other encryption.
Although I’m only basing this on one guy’s report of his discussion with an AAPL “Sr. Export Compliance Specialist”, that report sounds pretty definitive. If you’re shipping an app with HTTPS (though you should check this for yourself) it sounds like you’ve got some bureaucracy in your future. Better start planning for it now.
Stanley Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” is a really good movie. It’s easy to overlook: It’s a period piece, leisurely paced, and the titular protagonist is feckless at best. The more I look at it, however, the more I like it. For one thing, it’s very funny. (”Parts, anyway”, as the cowboy from “The Big Lebowski” might say.)
Sharks dissuaded Doug from the dive.
The zooming behavior of UIScrollView is counterintuitive and not terribly well documented – particularly when one is dealing with a tiled scroll view. Today I present a simple “infinite zoom” demo (over an admittedly pretty bland world) that I hope will helpfully illustrate a concise zoom implementation.
Ultimately, who you are is determined not by what you might do, or what you’d like to do, or what you would do in some hypothetical; it’s determined by what you do in the situations life actually throws your way. The chief reward of doing the right thing – and the only reward that can’t be taken away – is what doing the right thing tells you about who you are.
Chapter 9 of David Maurer’s “The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man” (TBC) is largely a glossary of terms used by con men of the early 20th century. It’s interesting, but mostly beside any points I’m interested in exploring here. Chapter 10 is a brief speculation on the future (now the past) of the con man, as Maurer saw it.
Evan tried to negotiate. He couldn’t.
When you want to find out something about a subject, you’re generally in search of exactly one of the two different types of resources:
Using the wrong type of resource will be an exercise in frustration. Even more frustrating will be to deal with a resource that straddles the two types badly. The most common example of this is the explanation that trails off into a reference because its author grew tired of explaining (which is quite difficult) and opted to infodump instead. (Wikipedia, I’m looking at you.)
