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I cannot believe I missed this TED talk by David McCandless from Infomration is Beautiful. The most important point that he made was how long it took him to make a single graphic in his book, and that graphic provided context that otherwise did not exist. A lot of times people will put numbers on top of an image, but that kind of visualization does not have the impact that McCandless’s visualizations have. Check out the website and share your favorites in the comments.

From The Intercept:

By targeting essential security keys used to encrypt data stored on Apple’s devices, the researchers have sought to thwart the company’s attempts to provide mobile security to hundreds of millions of Apple customers across the globe. Studying both “physical” and “non-invasive” techniques, U.S. government-sponsored research has been aimed at discovering ways to decrypt and ultimately penetrate Apple’s encrypted firmware. This could enable spies to plant malicious code on Apple devices and seek out potential vulnerabilities in other parts of the iPhone and iPad currently masked by encryption.

This afternoon I watched the Apple Watch event. In addition to the watch Apple unveiled a new MacBook and refreshed their MacBook Pro with Retina Display. We finally learned about the widely variable pricing of the watches and their release date. Overall it was exciting to see the improvements but I am not sure what is going on with this new laptop.

There are lots of charlatan financial advisors out in the world that are waging a war on debt. In the strange world that these creatures inhabit, being able to own a yacht or ferrari at age 65 is much more exciting than taking a trip to Europe at age 25. Investing $60,000 in college to earn $46,000 is a much more rational decision than taking a job at $30,000 out of high school but you would not know it from the debt fearmongers. Some people say that money cannot buy happiness, but the data does not support this.

This seemed like a simple thing to do when I watched a 30 minute video on it. Unfortunately it has been more of a learning experience than I hoped. A minor difference in a file that Ubuntu includes by default meant that the documentation for Phusion Passenger 4 was not correct. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to get environmental variables working in my deployment, and my solution is now on Stackoverflow.