Events

U.S. Magistrate Judge Sheri Pym yesterday ordered Apple, Inc., to bypass security on the iPhone 5c owned by the San Bernadino shooters. Apple said no: In his statement, [Apple CEO Tim] Cook called the court order an “unprecedented step” by the federal government. “We oppose this order, which has implications far beyond the legal case at hand,” he wrote. “The F.B.I. may use different words to describe this tool, but make no mistake: Building a version of iOS that bypasses security in this way would...

On Friday I mused about which new technology (or technologies) I should learn in the next few weeks. As if they're reading my mind (or blog) up in Redmond, just this morning Microsoft's Brady Gaster blogged about a little Raspberry Pi project he did: I broke out my Raspberry Pi and my Azure SDK 2.8.2-enabled Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition and worked up a quick-and-dirty application that can send sensor data to an API App running in Azure App Service. This post walks through the creation of this...

CATO institute fellow Steve Hanke and Johns Hopkins physics professor Dick Henry advocate eliminating time zones: The plan was strikingly simple. Rather than try to regulate a variety of time zones all around the world, we should instead opt for something far easier: Let's destroy all these time zones and instead stick with one big "Universal Time." While it may ultimately simplify our lives, the concept would require some big changes to the way we think about time. As the clocks would still be based...

Software developer Todd Schneider has analyzed 22 million CitiBikes trips (the New York equivalent of Chicago's Divvy). He's even got some cool animations: If you stare at the animation for a bit, you start to see some trends. My personal favorite spots to watch are the bridges that connect Brooklyn to Lower Manhattan. In the morning, beginning around 8 AM, you see a steady volume of bikes crossing from Brooklyn into Manhattan over the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges. In the middle of the...

I haven't had a moment to blog this weekend, but wow, what a major political event yesterday. Justice Scalia died suddenly on Saturday, and almost immediately Senate Republicans said they won't allow any nominee from President Obama to come to a vote. As Josh Marshall points out, this had no purpose save one: In a typically insightful Twitter spree last night, David Frum noted that "McConnell’s precipitate statement [that he would refuse to hold a vote on any Obama appointee] is wrong not only on...

I'm debating what new area I should explore, assuming I have the time: SignalR, maybe by making the Weather Now home page auto-update? Python, maybe by putting together some scripts that use a new API I create for The Daily Parker? Bootstrap, maybe by overhauling the Inner Drive Technology corporate website? Raspberry Pi, maybe by making a cute little device that responds to a Weather Now API? I'm thinking about a few side projects, obviously. And this article on new "universal remote" apps in...

Some of my libertarian-minded friends have circulated an article written by Cato Institute senior fellow Daniel J. Mitchell, an anti- flat-tax advocate, claiming that Cam Newton will pay a 200% tax to California on his Superbowl earnings. Mitchell quotes "a Certified Public Accountant" writing in a Forbes article at length, ending with this legerdemain: If the Panthers ... lose [the Superbowl, Newton] will only net another $51,000. The Panthers will have about 206 total duty days during 2016, including...

The Daily WTF (a must-read if you're in a technology job) today described how poor testing caused 2,000 ballots to be thrown out in a 2014 election in Brussels: It wasn’t enough to sway any one election, but the media had already caught wind of the potential voter fraud. Adrien’s company was hired for an independent code review of Delacroy Europe’s voting program to determine if anything criminal had transpired. He noticed something strange in the UI selection functions, triggered when the user selects...

Sears, Roebuck & Co. was founded only a couple years after the Chicago fire (and the Apollo Chorus). For decades people equated the Sears brand with mail-order retail. They could deliver anything, anywhere, and people in rural 19th- and early-20th-century America depended on them. Their success and business acumen culminated in them commissioning the tallest building in the world just over 40 years ago. Their current chairman, Eddie Lampert, took over in 2004, and immediately applied the teachings and...

Salon's Seth Stevenson highlights the Cartography and Geographic Information Society's "Best of Show" map from this year. It may not be the best map of the U.S. ever drawn, but wow, it's impressive: David Imus worked alone on his map seven days a week for two full years. Nearly 6,000 hours in total. It would be prohibitively expensive just to outsource that much work. But Imus—a 35-year veteran of cartography who’s designed every kind of map for every kind of client—did it all by himself. He used a...