Reactions to Facebook's graph search are negative

Am I the only person who thinks that exposing logical inconsistencies is a required part of progress? Or that the resulting discomfort is an indicator of the importance of exploring such incongruities?

Amsterdam is for lovers.

Amsterdam was a great combination of visiting old friends, making new friends, and meeting old friends for the first time, all wrapped up in an incredibly unique and beautiful city. But perhaps most importantly, Cindy got some pony time.

It was drizzly all day in Germany. Hope this person managed to stay dry, because they were obviously fed up with their umbrella.

Germany was fun, but it was a grueling travel day—we had to get to Amsterdam that evening—so there was a lot of trains, and a fair amount of waiting for trains.

I'm a bit late catching up on feeds, but I came across Brent Simmons' post on Coalescing today and—having solved the same problem in a different way—thought I'd chime in.

Coalescing calls is great for things like data stores that are backed by an archive on disk, because you want every operation to call -synchronize when it's finished (for data integrity), but you also don't want it to be over-called (for performance). In my own use today, coalescing saved 75% of the disk writes in my test harness which, while obviously a contrived case, proved its usefuless immediately.

In my own limited experience, NSTimer or -performSelector:afterDelay: are a code smell¹, and their use should be eliminated and replaced with something that is more appropriate to the problem being solved. In unit testing, I use dispatch_group to block tests until the side effects (in this case, delegate calls) have been completed as expected. For call coalescing—since I'm already using GCD for mutexing—I simply add a counter:

// Called on lockQueue, a serial dispatch queue.
- (void)synchronize;
{
    self.syncCount++;

    dispatch_async(lockQueue, ^{
        if (--self.syncCount == 0) {
            // Do your work here.
        }
    });
}

Super simple, and if you're already using dispatch queues for locking, which I highly recommend, all you need to add is a property. For a minor performance boost (avoiding Block_copy) replace dispatch_async with dispatch_async_f and the appropriate glue.

My dad likes being doted on.

While in Alaska, we had to do the stereotypical tourist stuff, such as whale watching, in case we didn't make it out there again.

But the trip wasn't entirely unfamiliar sights…

Apple probably wouldn’t have crammed iOS 6 onto the 3GS if they were about to stop selling it. Marco Arment

I've been seeing a lot of fixation on the sale of the 3GS in the tech press lately and I think they're missing an important point: it's decent to ship updates for hardware that's under warranty.

The first update that didn't support the original iPhone was released 1 year, 11 months, and 10 days after the original iPhone was discontinued¹. The 3G got its last update 1 year, 4 months, and 8 days after its demise². If the 3GS were obsoleted by iOS6, someone buying a new one tomorrow would be getting the same kind of software support as if they'd waited until the last minute to buy a MyTouch 3G. People expect more from Apple than that.

The important thing about the chart Michael DeGusta posted last year isn't that every iPhone was on the latest software 3 years after release, it was that every iPhone ever sold has had access to the latest version of iOS for at least a year after purchase. Given the reported effort it took to get iOS6 running smoothly on the 3GS, it's not worth selling after the launch of the New iPhone—that would require getting iOS7 to run on it as well.

Today we pulled into Juneau. I'm starting to get the impression that even the biggest cities in Alaska feel cozy, because we didn't get the feeling that this was a capital city; more like a fishing town.