I am draconian when it comes to code formatting. Combined with an “I’ll know it when I see it” attitude, this can become irritating. In exasperation, a colleague suggested using clang-format to automatically format our Objective C codebase. Their proposal:

I’ll get the tool’s formatting specification as close to what you like as possible. In return, you agree that you’ll accept what the tool produces.

So, quite some time ago, we introduced a clang-formatting file to our repository.

Back in the late 1990s, AOL tried to create an alternative internet. It was roundly derided, and everyone instead used its sign-up CDs as drink coasters.

As far as I can see, Facebook is now trying very hard to create an alternative internet for its users, one which threatens to be more successful.

Facebook has said publicly that it wants to make the experience of consuming content online more seamless. News articles on Facebook are currently linked to the publisher’s own website, and open in a web browser[…]

I was prototyping using TMDb for film search in One to Watch to solve the problem of Freebase’s API going away. While doing this I noticed that the memory usage of the app was going up significantly every time I opened a film’s details view.

Using the Allocations tool in Instruments, I could see that the memory was increasing in a staircase like manner. Looking at the memory listing shown in Instruments, it was clear that this stepping was caused by decoded PNG images, used to display the cover art. Each time the details view was shown, another 3MB PNG image appeared in Instruments.

One to Watch, my app to help you remember films you want to watch, uses Freebase when it’s searching for films. Freebase is an amazing database, built on community data. Google bought Freebase a few years ago, and made Freebase into the basis of Knowledge Graph. Up until now, this hasn’t been a problem; Google kept the old Freebase API up and running, albeit at new URLs.

However, by chance when updating some URL handling code in One to Watch, I was checking the Freebase API and noticed:

Moonpig, an online greetings card company suffered a security vulnerability. While the vulnerability was serious, far worse was the company’s deliberately misleading statement in response to the disclosure:

We are aware of claims re customer data and can confirm that all password and payment information is and has always been safe.

— Moonpig (@MoonpigUK) January 6, 2015

Indeed this tiny subset of information was “safe”. What was leaked was all other personal information held by Moonpig about every customer. Much worse than a password or a credit card that can be easily changed. That the company issues a statement like this indicates how little they care about their customers.