The Insider News

Smartphone-friendly Satis toilets eradicate waste, provide a soundtrack for your business[^]

You can also use the app for the requisite music playback, because no one wants to go in silence.

Ars Technica[^]:

The integrity of Windows Store applications is an important issue. It forms part of the value proposition to developers, of the store itself; not only does the store provide easy, reliable billing, distribution, and updating, it also provides at least some degree of protection against piracy and other kinds of exploitation. If Windows 8 can't provide this then competing platforms (such as iOS) and competing delivery mechanisms (such as the Web) become more appealing.

thecodingbrain[^]:

If computer programming languages are languages, then people who spoke one language and could programme to a high standard should be bilingual. Research has suggested that bilingual people perform faster than monolingual people at tasks requiring executive control – that is, tasks involving the ability to pay attention to important information and ignore irrelevant information. So, I set out to find out whether computer programmers were better at these tasks too.

Brython[^]:

Brython is designed to replace Javascript as the scripting language for the Web. As such, it is a Python implementation (you can take it for a test drive through a web console), adapted to the HTML5 environment, that is to say with an interface to the DOM objects and events. The gallery highlights a few of the possibilities, from creating simple document elements to drag and drop and 3D navigation.

derick_bailey[^]:

When someone submits an issue or a pull request that is “obviously wrong” in your eyes, don’t make fun of them and kick them out of the cool club. Help them learn from the situation. Ask more questions, find out why they are suggesting this change. Dig in to the reasons behind the request and see if there is any merit to it. Take the time to understand their perspective and thought process before you react and judge others.

Sam Stephenson[^]:

In just a few short years Prototype went from best practice to anti-pattern—and depending on who you listened to, you might even be convinced that it was one of the worst things to happen to the web. The reality is that Prototype helped lots of people despite its flawed foundation. But its time had come and gone, and I eventually realized it was time to move on. It was hard not to take Prototype’s failure personally.

bunnie's blog[^]:

We are building an open laptop, with some wacky features in it for hackers like me.... Of course, a feature of a build-it-yourself laptop is that all the design documentation is open, so others of sufficient skill and resources can also build it. The hardware and its sub-components are picked so as to make this the most practically open hardware laptop I could create using state of the art technology.

Gamasutra[^]:

This is not intended to be a list of 10 developers who happened to make good games in 2012 (though releasing a good game certainly didn't hurt anyone's chances of being included). When selecting the developers on this list (presented alphabetically), Gamasutra and Game Developer magazine editors determined which ones defined the year in a positive way. These are the developers and studios that left their mark on 2012 -- the ones that the industry will be watching in the years ahead.

The Register[^]:

The transistor, the ubiquitous building block of all electronic circuits, will be 65 years old on Sunday. The device is jointly credited to William Shockley (1910-1989), John Bardeen (1908-1991) and Walter Brattain (1902-1987), and it was Bardeen and Brattain who operated the first working point-contact transistor during an experiment conducted on 16 December 1947. Yet this now ubiquitous device - these days more as an element in silicon chip design than as a discrete component - has a history that goes back to the mid-1920s.

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

The core problem here is that many test organizations design their test regimes to test Security Suites... and then apply those tests just to MSE rather than to the entire “Microsoft security suite” of which it is part. Why? One key reason is that Microsoft doesn’t explicitly offer a security suite, instead it spreads security capabilities across its products and components. Rather than MSE being the cornerstone of its security efforts, as an anti-malware engine is for a traditional security vendor, for Microsoft MSE is a component that fills in a missing piece in the Windows security effort.

Anil Dash[^]:

The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we've lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.

The Register[^]:

C++ 11 is “far better than previous versions”, says the inventor of the language Bjarne Stroustrup.... C++ is an ISO standard, first ratified in 1998 with C++ 11 completed in 2011, but Stroustrup revealed he was initially resistant to standardisation efforts. “It took some arm-twisting to get me to realise that it was time to start a standards effort," he said. "People pointed out that you couldn’t have a language used by millions controlled by a single guy in a single company. Even if you could trust the guy, you can’t trust the corporation. I was a bit sad, because the things I wanted to do would take years instead of months, because you have to build up consensus, and then you have to wait for five compilers to catch up."

Web Advent 2012[^]:

I like PHP, Python, and JavaScript, and I like making things in PHP, Python, and JavaScript. I’m not a Symfony developer, or a Django developer, or a jQuery developer. I think this is an important distinction. It’s entirely possible to be a jQuery developer, but not a JavaScript developer. It’s possible to be a Django developer, but not a Python developer. Those are all certainly valuable and useful tools, but if I only know how to use one framework, my options for using the right tool for the job get pretty limited, and in my experience, large, full-stack frameworks are often not the right tool, particularly if flexibilty and performance are major concerns.

danielmiessler.com[^]:

What follows is a primer on the key security-oriented characteristics of the HTTP protocol. It's a collection of a number of different sub-topics, explained in my own way, for the purpose of having a single reference point when needed.

Channel 9[^]:

We are excited to announce an update to the Visual Studio Achievements extension: the availability of nineteen new achievements all oriented toward Windows 8 app development. These new achievements can be earned in JavaScript, C#, VB and C++. Some examples include: I Like To Move It Move It which is earned by using the accelerometer and The Play Is The Thing which is earned by using the AutoPlay contract.

Visual Studio Magazine[^]:

Now that the final versions of Windows 8 and Visual Studio 2012 have shipped, most Silverlight developers are looking at ways to translate their existing skill set to Windows Runtime (WinRT) apps built with XAML. Because you're already familiar with XAML, you need to understand what the Windows Runtime consists of, and how it's different than what you're used to. In this article, I document 10 things I've found while building my first WinRT app using XAML/C#; I hope they'll save you time and energy getting used to this new platform.

NYTimes.com[^]:

A retired mechanical engineer, Mr. Woodland was a graduate student when he and a classmate, Bernard Silver, created a technology — based on a printed series of wide and narrow striations — that encoded consumer-product information for optical scanning. Their idea, developed in the late 1940s and patented 60 years ago this fall, turned out to be ahead of its time. But it would ultimately give rise to the universal product code, or U.P.C., as the staggeringly prevalent rectangular bar code is officially known.

Exploring IE[^]:

The web browser is not only important at home or in school. For business, the browser is a key tool for accessing line of business apps, connecting with customers and partners, modernizing employee desktops, and enabling employees the flexibility to work from anywhere. Choosing the right browser is critical for organizations, and a choice that has far-reaching impact on organizational security, productivity and application development costs.... Forrester found that ninety-six percent of firms today standardize on a single browser for company-issued PCs.

evanmiller.org[^]:

The programming profession is blessed with a number of gifted essayists. Today I will pick on three of my favorites — Eric Raymond, Paul Graham, and Steve Yegge — because they all seem to disagree about why (and whether) mathematics is relevant to the practicing programmer. They seem to agree on one thing...

TechHive[^]:

Tablets have come a long way since Apple first introduced the original iPad in 2010. They’ve gotten thinner (and, sometimes, thicker), smaller (and, sometimes, larger), more durable, and, of course, cheaper. But how cheap is too cheap? Does a worthy tablet exist for just $100?

Ars Technica[^]:

At long last, Google has released its own iPhone maps app to compete against Apple's homegrown version introduced with iOS 6. For three months, iPhone users have been limited to Google's functional-but-lacking mobile mapping site, and their reaction to the new app tells us all we need to know: people really missed native Google Maps support.

Eric's Blog[^]:

I’ve been thinking about code review lately, and took a little time to look at the Linux kernel git tree to see how many commits are marked with “Reviewed-by” (indicates that the patch has been reviewed and found acceptable). The short answer is, not a whole lot – or at least not consistently, but improving.

Iron.io Blog[^]:

We’ve been working with, building, and evangelising message queues for the last year, and it’s no secret that we think they’re awesome. We believe message queues are a vital component to any architecture or application, and here are ten reasons why...

SpiderLabs Anterior[^]:

Network penetration testers love to complain about the unrealistic scope restrictions that get placed on our work.... Our clients place these restrictions on our work because at some point in the past they got burned. A penetration tester locked out user accounts, created an accidental black hole in the network, or brought down a production server. But isn't it ironic that blackhats bent on data theft so rarely cause system outages?

Infragistics.com Blog[^]:

Whether you’re a developer or designer, 3rd party tools can improve productivity and just make life easier. Here you will find my top 5 tools I use on a day to day basis. Hopefully you will find them as useful as I do!

Xamarin Blog[^]:

Xamarin.Mac allows developers to build fully-native Cocoa applications for Mac OS X with C#. Xamarin.Mac exposes native platform APIs, making it possible for developers to build sophisticated apps that integrate with platform conventions and leverage the rich spectrum of platform-specific functionality that make Mac apps so beautiful and distinctive.

samsclass.info[^]:

This is an improved Router Advertisement flood attack: First it simulates ten normal routers, and then sends the new flood_router26 RA flood. That makes it much more effective against all Apple devices we have tried. As the video shows, it can now kill four devices at once via a wireless network.... Microsoft's IPv6 Readiness Update greatly alleviates this vulnerability.... However, it's only available for Win 7 and Win Server 2008 R2.

Wired UK[^]:

A vulnerability found in Microsoft's Internet Explorer allows hackers to track the movements of your mouse cursor across the screen, which could in turn reveal data entered on virtual keyboards. Virtual keyboards and keypads can be used to reduce the chance of a keylogger recording every keystroke and therefore being able to "read" your passwords. However Spider.io discovered that Internet Explorer versions 6 to 10 make it possible for your mouse cursor to be tracked anywhere on screen, even if the IE tab is minimised.

Macworld[^]:

Over the course of the intervening years... Mac OS X has evolved in a decidedly NeXT-skewed direction. Mac OS X technologies that began life at NeXT (such as Cocoa and Services) have thrived; technologies from the classic Mac OS (such as Carbon) have been deprecated and eliminated. AppleScript, however, is an exception to that evolutionary pattern—and, in many regards, an exceptionally surprisingly one.

ExtremeTech[^]:

Two researchers — Johannes Kopf from Microsoft, and Dani Lischinski from The Hebrew University — have successfully created an algorithm that depixelizes and upscales low-resolution 8-bit “pixel art” into lush vector graphics. The algorithm identifies pixel-level details to accurately shade the new image — but more importantly, the algorithm can create smooth, curved contour lines from only-connected-on-the-diagonal single pixels.

Ars Technica[^]:

Linus Torvalds has officially announced that version 3.7 of the Linux kernel has gone stable, and that means good news for developers who work with ARM-based CPUs: among its other changes, Linux 3.7 is the first Linux kernel to include generic support for multiple ARM CPU architectures, reducing the amount of effort required to get Linux-based operating systems running on phones, tablets, and ARM-licensed developer boards like the Raspberry Pi.

The Register[^]:

Yet still the users of Delphi turned out Windows code that was not so dusty, and demanded no runtime, and could fetch its backside off the disk and be begging for input before certain alternatives could so much as put up a 'Please wait' dialog....

HTML5Rocks Updates[^]:

A lot has happened with WebRTC over the last few weeks. Time for an update! In particular, we're really excited to see WebRTC arriving on multiple browsers and platforms.

The Real Adam[^]:

When modeling how our domain objects map to what is stored in a database, an object-relational mapper often comes into the picture. And then, the angst begins. Bad queries are generated, weird object models evolve, junk-drawer objects emerge, cohesion goes down and coupling goes up. It’s not that ORMs are a smell. They are genuinely useful things that make it easier for developers to go from an idea to a working, deployable prototype. But its easy to fall into the habit of treating them as a top-level concern in our applications.

Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots[^]:

Vim’s just not designed for demonstrations, and for a beginners talk at a Stockholm Vim meetup I needed something that looked a little less magical. The solution was to write Vimulator, a JavaScript Vim simulator that’s designed to explain each key stroke as it happens and delay the effect on the text long enough for a casual observer to see what’s going on.... Next time you’re explaining Vim to a colleague, give Vimulator a try, or if you’ve been put off before by introductions that felt like a magic show we’ve got some posts and videos to help you learn vim.

Made of Bugs[^]:

Software engineers, as a rule, suck at writing things down. Part of this is training – unlike chemists and biologists who are trailed to obsessively document everything they do in their lab notebooks, computer scientists are taught to document the end results of their work, but aren’t, in general, taught to take notes as they go, and document the steps they take in building a system. 6.005, MIT’s new introductory software engineering class, attempted to require its students to keep lab notebooks for a few semesters, and was met with near-universal complaints and ridicule from the students...