A month in which Brussels failed to agree its own budget, demanded a separate euro-area budget anyway, set quotas for company boards, and packed three presidents off to Oslo to collect a peace prize that three actual peace laureates begged it to refuse.
Years of reflection make Christmas even more meaningful. The birth of Jesus offers hope that lasts through all seasons.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), directed by Peter Jackson, is based on the novel by J. R. R. Tolkien. Martin Freeman plays Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit who leaves his comfortable home to join a company of dwarves on a quest to reclaim their lost kingdom.
Three scientists who made a remarkable invention are murdered, and De Cock must work out who wanted them dead.
The Petraeus affair pushed email privacy into the headlines, breaches struck Adobe, NASA and South Carolina, and governments from Syria to Washington reached for new powers over our data.
The article discusses Key-Value Coding (KVC) Collection Operators in Objective-C, which provide a concise, Ruby-like syntax for performing aggregate operations on collections using valueForKeyPath:.
Monthly update 271 • November 2012 • 2012-11-01 - 2012-11-30
In A Wanted Man, Reacher hitches a ride with kidnappers, then joins the FBI to pursue them after a roadside murder in Nebraska.
The month Brussels gave itself a medal for peace, lost a commissioner to a cash-for-snus scandal, launched a banking takeover, and discovered that its own boardroom quota was illegal.
NSOrderedSet is not a subclass of NSSet due to problems with Objective-C's single inheritance and the mutable/immutable class pairs in Foundation's class clusters.
NS_ENUM and NS_OPTIONS are the modern, Apple-approved way to declare enums and bit-masks.
Three single men who collect antiques die of heart attacks within a short time, each found in a house that has been stripped bare.
NSURLProtocol is the most powerful (and least-known) piece of Apple’s URL Loading System.
Monthly update 270 • October 2012 • 2012-10-01 - 2012-10-31
Back in jail and sick of failure, the Dalton brothers turn on Joe and bet that whoever first earns a million dollars will lead the gang, then break out and go their separate ways.
October 2012 paired huge state and corporate breaches with a widening fight over tracking, as carriers, advertisers and governments all reached for more of our data.
September 2012, the month Brussels banned the rest of your light bulbs, demanded a federation of nation states, and handed the European Central Bank the keys to everyone's banks and bond markets at once.
NSLinguisticTagger offers powerful tools to process natural language. It breaks strings into tokens, finds parts of speech and stems, pulls out names of people, places, and groups, and spots languages and scripts.
The Address Book UI framework in iOS, used alongside AddressBook.framework, provides controllers for managing contacts but includes a uniquely valuable function, ABCreateStringWithAddressDictionary(), which formats address components into a localised string.
Monthly update 269 • September 2012 • 2012-09-01 - 2012-09-30
A worker accuses his former employer of dumping poison in the Amstel, and the case grows into something far darker for De Cock.
September 2012 mixed state censorship of Google, YouTube and Twitter with hard breach disclosures, fresh browser and card flaws and a wave of surveillance and tracking fights.
The month the European Central Bank promised to buy bonds without limit, Greece guarded its own border without permission, and Brussels quietly shelved its plan to read everyone's phone records, but only for now.
Spy Game (2001), directed by Tony Scott, is a sharp and thrilling espionage film that keeps you hooked. Robert Redford is outstanding as Nathan Muir, a seasoned CIA operative racing against time to save his protégé, Tom Bishop, played with intensity by Brad Pitt.
The Dictator (2012), directed by Larry Charles, is a comedy about a North African tyrant who loses his identity while visiting New York. Sacha Baron Cohen plays Admiral General Aladeen, the ruler of the fictional Republic of Wadiya.