Ron Conway’s Advice for Young Founders at YC’s Startup School (via Sci-Fi Hi-Fi):

"But [angel investor Ron Conway] took a turn for the serious, warning the enthusiastic crowd that “you have to be willing to work 24/7.” He then went a step further, solemnly claiming, “Dating someone or married: warn them that they’re not first in line, that you have this vocation, that your duty is to your company. It has to be that fanatical.”

There are two kinds of businesspeople: those that want to build a small company that becomes a large company, and those that want to build a company as fast as they can without regard for living life. The above advice falls into the latter.

This App Avoided Being Made Useless By Using The iPhone’s Charger (But Not For Charging):

But wait! The iPhone 6 has round edges. It can’t stand upright on its own. Cycloramic is doomed, right?

Clever. Very clever.

Can C.E.O. Satya Nadella Save Microsoft? | Vanity Fair:

There’s a sense in the world outside Redmond, Washington, that Microsoft’s best days are behind it, that the sprawling colossus, which employs more than 100,000 people, doesn’t know what it is, or even what it wants to be. Gates and Nadella are adamant that’s not the case, and they are both adept at the sort of big-picture corporate-speak designed to persuade people that the company not only has its act together but also has a vision. In their view, this new world of unlimited computing power, where your devices can connect you anytime, anywhere, should rightfully belong to Microsoft. They even have a catchphrase: “Re-inventing productivity.”

Count me in the former group.

The Story of the PING Program:

I quickly coded up the PING program, which revolved around opening an ICMP style SOCK_RAW AF_INET Berkeley-style socket(). The code compiled just fine, but it didn't work -- there was no kernel support for raw ICMP sockets! Incensed, I coded up the kernel support and had everything working well before sunrise. Not surprisingly, Chuck Kennedy (aka "Kermit") had found and fixed the network hardware before I was able to launch my very first "ping" packet. But I've used it a few times since then. *grin* If I'd known then that it would be my most famous accomplishment in life, I might have worked on it another day or two and added some more options.

GT to close sapphire plant and sever ties with Apple:

Rumor had it that the then-forthcoming iPhone 6 would use sapphire or sapphire-coated glass to protect their displays from scratches, and it sent GT’s stock climbing. On September 9, Apple announced new iPhones with “ion-strengthened glass,” not sapphire. This sent GT’s stock sliding downward.

Lovely.

A project I’m working on needed to secure the Core Data database on-disk in iOS (the nature of the content demanded it). When asked about this I instinctively said, “Sure! iOS has data protection APIs that easily allow that!”

I should stop answering so quickly.

Yes, there are APIs for that. The ones you’ll find mentioned all around the Internet are the additions to NSData and NSFileManager that let you use the NSFileProtectionKey attribute and set the protection class of the file and — MAGIC! — the file is encrypted and the keys are managed for you. The very first thing I did, then, was to naively write:

At first the idea that a collection in Swift could only be one kind of object bothered me, but I’m slowly seeing a useful pattern emerging from this — one that Obj-C made tedious due to its grafting of an pass-by-reference-only object pattern on top of another language.

In the specific case that I just solved, for example, I have a table controller with a static list of choices and actions that would be performed when clicked. In Obj-C I’d probably do something like:

Cathode is a fully customizable terminal app with a look inspired by classic computers. Don’t let the playful exterior fool you; under the hood there’s an advanced emulator designed for serious work. Whether you prefer crisp, clean text, or a flickering, glowing mess, Cathode is the perfect tool for hacking in style.

This thing is gorgeous, and highly usable.
Cathode

Thanks, Restrictions! Can we block the Tips app, too? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

Hey, podcasters: shut up sooner. I can only keep up with so many 90-120m episodes a week.

Radio shows have turned meeting a mark into a science. Listen to a few and figure it out. Science Friday is a great example (of pretty much everything regarding an audio show).