The Insider News

The '60s at 50[^]:

Associating numbers with specific characters has proved necessary to allow automated telegraph printers (teleprinters) and then computers to represent text. The most widely used mapping between numbers and letters was that approved on June 17, 1963, by the American Standards Association. It is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII.

Math with Bad Drawings[^]:

Once at a picnic, I saw mathematicians crowding around the last game I would have expected: Tic-tac-toe. As you may have discovered yourself, tic-tac-toe is terminally dull. There’s no room for creativity or insight.... But the mathematicians at the picnic played a more sophisticated version...

Proper Fixation[^]:

Today, pretty much everyone has a CPU, a DSP and a GPU, buried somewhere in their PC, phone, car, etc. Most don't know or care that they bought any of these, but they did. Will everyone, at some future point, also buy an FPGA? The market size of FPGAs today is about 1% of the annual global semiconductor sales (~$3B vs ~$300B). Will FPGA eventually become a must-have, or will its volume remain relatively low?

Intel Developer Zone[^]:

By day, David Auld is an Offshore Installation Manager (OIM) in the oil and gas industry. But when the production platform is humming along without him, Auld indulges his hobby as a devout “petrol-head” (car enthusiast). He also finds time to feed a passion for programming, which led to him earning a 2012 BSC Honours Degree in Computing. Surprisingly, these three facets of the native Scotsman all converged when Auld won the Entertainment Category of the Intel App Innovation Contest.

Daemonic Dispatches[^]:

Thomas Ptacek tweeted yesterday that "If you're not learning crypto by coding attacks, you might not actually be learning crypto." Judging by the number of twitter "favourites" and "retweets" of this comment, it seems to have struck a chord; but with all respect to Thomas, I absolutely disagree. Not only is it possible to learn cryptography without writing a line of code, but coding attacks is entirely useless for learning about modern cryptography; the best route to learning modern cryptography is a study of mathematical proofs.

Dream.In.Code[^]:

I'm interested in people's current predictions on what will happen to the various languages over the next few years. Java has had a bad press in recent years but has a major new release. Is this a new lease of life, particularly with Android taking off so rapidly?

Kloud Blog[^]:

Many years ago, back in Uni, I saw 2 guys in a computer lab writing a whole programming assignment without running it even once. The program was of relatively decent size written in C and consequently there were hundreds of compilation errors. That’s so silly, I thought.... After graduation I used to be a C++ programmer. The syntax sometimes was quite tricky and you would often compile after every new line of code. Sometimes, you would dare to write a whole function, just to find 10 compilation errors. Since then the way I code has changed with help of modern IDE...

Channel 9[^]:

Ever wondered how the pro’s physically manage to make a module? Well ok, you can get a fancy pick and place machine or send off for someone to assemble your module, but you can do it by hand. It is not as hard as expected. As part of a .NET Gadgeteer hands on event at the Modern Jago in Shoreditch we were delighted to have Justin Wilson from Ingenuity Micro attend and show us how things are done (www.ingenuitymicro.com). He has designed and built an nice collection of .NET Gadgeteer modules and mainboards and expects to have them available shortly.

Haacked[^]:

Code review is a tricky business. Code is full of hidden mines that lay dormant while you test just to explode in a debris of stack trace at the most inopportune time – when its in the hands of your users. The many times I’ve run into such mines just reinforce how important it is to write code that is intention revealing and to make sure assumptions are documented via asserts. Such devious code is often the most innocuous looking code.