"Computer programming is the art, craft and science of writing programs which define how computers operate. This book will teach you how to write computer programs using a programming language designed by Google named Go." Freely available book on Go.

This could be big - although just how big remains unclear. "There you have. 1,000,001 Apple Devices UDIDs linking to their users and their APNS tokens. The original file contained around 12,000,000 devices. We decided a million would be enough to release. We trimmed out other personal data as, full names, cell numbers, addresses, zipcodes, etc." How did AntiSec get this data (they claim)? From an FBI laptop. Why an FBI laptop would have a file with personal information on 12 million iOS users, we don't know - especially since 10000 of them are Dutch/Belgian, and last I checked, those do not fall under FBI jurisdiction. Did the FBI obtain it from an application developer, or from Apple itself? Then again - 12 million users? From a single iOS developer? I find that hard to believe.

Pretty scummy stuff by Samsung, this. The company apologised, but what it shows is just how warped tech reporting and blogging really is. Websites are dependent on review items, early access, and press invites, and we really have no idea just how much this influences reporting. Do you really think that reviewers and bloggers who are too critical will get invited to the next product unveil in Cupertino or will get early access to the next Galaxy device? If so, I have a palace to sell you.

I like this one: "By definition, a program is an entity that is run by the computer. It talks directly to the CPU and the OS. Code that does not talk directly to the CPU and the OS, but is instead run by some other program that does talk directly to the CPU and the OS, is not a program; it's a script." Here's the other eleven.

"Microsoft this week updated its services agreement with subtle, yet potentially significant changes to its policy on privacy and dispute settlement. The company notified users of the changes in an e-mail sent Friday, informing them that the new Terms of Service would go into effect on October 19th. Apparently taking its cue from Google, Microsoft's revised policy allows the company to access and display user content across all of its cloud properties." Microsoft said, when Google announced an identical policy change: "Google is in the midst of making some unpopular changes to some of their most popular products. Those changes, cloaked in language like 'transparency', 'simplicity', and 'consistency', are really about one thing: making it easier for Google to connect the dots between everything you search, send, say or stream while using one of their services." Let me guess: no outraged blog posts from the usual suspects this time around.

"Efforts are split between models in which keyboards detach from screens, ones in which the keys remain attached but can be hidden behind displays, and traditional fixed clamshell designs." None of these really float my boat. They work with clunky connectors and weird hinges, while I'd much rather have Surface's nice magnetic connection. On top of that, Surface just looks way better than this stuff. Pretty clear why Microsoft felt the need to make their own hardware.

The Verge published a video demonstrating how desktop mode and Office 2013 - a desktop application - work on Windows RT, the ARM version of Windows 8. The video showed a desktop mode that clearly didn't work well for touch, and even Office 2013, which has a rudimentary touch mode built-in, didn't work properly either. It looked and felt clunky, often didn't respond properly, and even showed touch lag.

Where can I order? "Nokia's new flagship Windows Phone 8 device has been leaked today, revealed as the Lumia 920. Posted to Twitter by Evleaks, the Lumia 920 appears to include a PureView camera that the company has been hinting at in recent weeks. Codenamed the Phi, Nokia's Lumia 920 is said to include a 4.5-inch display and will likely be available in a number of colors judging by the leaked image." Yes miss, the red one please. No, no need to wrap it, don't need bag - I'll have ripped open the box before I go through the door.

"You are logged into your remote server via SSH and happily plucking along at your keyboard and then it happens. Suddenly, the characters stop moving and then you get the dreaded 'Connection Closed' message. You have just lost your session. You were halfway through some task and now you have to start over. Ugh. Well you can prevent this from happening by using screen. The Linux screen tool can not only save you from disconnection disasters, but it also can increase your productivity by using multiple windows within one SSH session. I use this tool all of the time in our server management work." An older tutorial, and even though I have little to no knowledge about screen, I know one thing: lots of people swear by it.

After more than a decade, Lazarus has reached version 1.0. For those that don't know Lazarus - it's a Delphi-like IDE for the Free Pascal Compiler and has widget sets for win32/64 GTK2, Qt, and others. It's very very much like Delphi and instead of the VCL it has the LCL which is cross platform. Syntax is almost exactly the same as Delphi. You can create stand-alone win32/64 executables that require no .NET runtime or even an installer.

Just driving yesterday's point home some more: "The Lilith was one of the first computer workstations worldwide with a high-resolution graphical display and a mouse. The first prototype was developed by Niklaus Wirth and his group between 1978 and 1980 with Richard Ohran as the hardware specialist. The whole system software of the Lilith was written in Modula-2, a structured programming language which Wirth has developed at the same time. The programs were compiled into low-level M-Code instructions which could be executed by the hardware. The user interface was designed with windows, icons and pop-up menus. Compared with the character based systems available at that time, these were revolutionary metaphors in the interaction with a computer." Jos Dreesen, owner of one of the few remaining working Liliths, wrote a Lilith emulator for Linux.

Miguel de Icaza: "To sum up: (a) First dimension: things change too quickly, breaking both open source and proprietary software alike; (b) incompatibility across Linux distributions. This killed the ecosystem for third party developers trying to target Linux on the desktop. You would try once, do your best effort to support the 'top' distro or if you were feeling generous 'the top three' distros. Only to find out that your software no longer worked six months later. Supporting Linux on the desktop became a burden for independent developers." Mac OS X came along to scoop up the Linux defectors.

Haiku's 64bit port is progressing nicely. "As you can see, this looks pretty much like a regular Haiku desktop. There's still a lot of things missing, though - not many apps or drivers yet. However, most things should be fairly simple to get working, typically just a few compilation fixes."

"Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in perspective, my group at the University of Toronto was working on multi-touch in 1984, the same year that the first Macintosh computer was released, and we were not the first. Furthermore, during the development of the iPhone, Apple was very much aware of the history of multi-touch, dating at least back to 1982, and the use of the pinch gesture, dating back to 1983. This is clearly demonstrated by the bibliography of the PhD thesis of Wayne Westerman, co-founder of FingerWorks, a company that Apple acquired early in 2005, and now an Apple employee. In making this statement about their awareness of past work, I am not criticizing Westerman, the iPhone, or Apple. It is simply good practice and good scholarship to know the literature and do one's homework when embarking on a new product. What I am pointing out, however, is that 'new' technologies - like multi-touch - do not grow out of a vacuum. While marketing tends to like the 'great invention' story, real innovation rarely works that way. In short, the evolution of multi-touch is a text-book example of what I call 'the long-nose of innovation'." If we lived in a just and science-based world, this detailed history alone would be enough for judges the world over to throw all of a certain company's patent aggression out the window. Sadly, we live in an unjust and money-based world.