Miscellanea

I 'm not in the mood for a long post, so here are some random thoughts in aggregate form:

f8

The new Facebook Social Plugins are FriendConnect done right. FriendConnect has so much potential yet the current implementation leaves a lot to be desired (to say the least). Moreover, the Graph API is a bold step forward towards the machine readable Web (Web 3.0 / Semantic Web if you will). The 'Like' button is an obvious (yet powerful) idea that Google should have implemented a long time ago.

π is wrong

I always thought that 'π' should be the number known as '2π'. Then 'π' would be the perimeter of the unit circle, angle measurements would be more intuitive (90 degrees == π/4, 180 degrees == π/2, 360 degrees = π, ie a full 'cycle' is π radians) and a lot of formulas would be simplified:

p = πr, i.e. scale the unit perimeter by the radius,
sin(x+π) = sin(x), i.e. the period of the trigonometric functions is π,

etc. At the moment π is the sum of the angles in a triangle and the perimeter of a circle of with a diameter equal to 1 (doesn't this look awkward to you?). Read π is wrong for a better treatment of the argument.

iPhoneOS TOS

The latest iPhoneOS TOS made a lot of developers angry. I don't agree. One of the problems in our profession is what I call a Babel situation: So many different languages and platforms hinder cooperation. Finding and integrating engineers into a software development team is a pain. Thus, having a single platform (iPhoneOS), a single system language (Objective C) and a single scripting/application language (JavaScript) is refreshing.