Bitcoin Bills

You can buy physical bitcoins now! This is a really cool idea -- they use a sticker and some plastic layers to cover the private key of the bitcoins.

I'm buying one and framing it.

http://bitbills.com/

Bitcoin

So I decided to buy some bitcoins because it was cool. The exchange rate at the time was around $0.80 per bitcoin. I put in a bit over $40.

Over the last few weeks, the price has nearly quadrupled to $3.80 per bitcoin. My $40 has turned into $190. About 2 weeks ago Paypal decided to ban bitcoins from their system -- this 'caused the price to double. Why?

They keep a daily graph of the exchange rate on this site:

http://mtgox.com/

Apple's Long Function Names

Sometimes they can get excessive... Look at this one:

CFURLCreateStringByReplacingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding

How are you supposed to make a call to that be clean? There's no way...

Stress Testing Generic Proxy

So I'm building some proxy software that any protocol can proxy over. I needed a proxy for a project I'm working on and I decided to make it generic so it's reusable.

In development I used a lot of telnet terminals. When it came time for stress testing I searched google images for the biggest image it could find. The first image was cool -- some kind of old black and white photo of a wagon in the snow. But it's website only worked if you pass the correct Host: parameter -- too much hassle. Would have been nice to look at...

So... I ended up using this 15 MB photo of the 911 towers:

I'm not sure if this should be depressing or interesting but I've been staring at it a lot during testing.

Original huge photo here.