The Insider News

Ayende @ Rahien[^]:

If you are wondering about the binary format, that is what this post is all about. We actually start from the end. We have the last 48 bytes of the file are dedicated to the footer....

dansdata.com[^]:

Today, I will be discussing recent happy developments in the profitable and entertaining field of stealing other people's Internet passwords. This used to be quite annoying. Every now and then some idiot would leave ftp.someidiot.com/secret/passwords.txt just sitting there in plaintext, not the salted password hashes that they should have saved. But usually it wasn't easy to get the hashed passwords, and then it was unacceptably computationally expensive for us to brute-force our way through passwords of ever-increasing length until we found some that matched the hashes. Brute-force cracking is getting faster and faster, but if the brute-forcing time for an 80486 was "one googolplex years", then even if modern hardware can do it a million times as fast, you're still not appreciably closer to the target.

Frama-C news and ideas[^]:

This post is the first in a series on the difficult task of rounding a floating-point number to an integer. Laugh not! The easiest-looking questions can hide unforeseen difficulties, and the most widely accepted solutions can be wrong.

Simon Weber[^]:

I started using a Samsung 550 Chromebook as my on-the-go machine two semesters ago. It worked nicely for taking notes, but I remained a skeptic: how could I ever write code from a glorified web browser? Fast forward 6 months: today, I love hacking on my Chromebook, and I have no problems working offline. It took some effort to get everything set up, so I’ve put together my recommendations to get other folks up to speed.

Sam who?[^]:

You have an idea for a program. It’s the best program idea you’ve ever had so you quickly prototype something in C... A work of genius. You quickly compile and run it to make sure all is good... Boom! But wait… What has happened? How has it gone from being quite an understandable high level program into being something that your processor can understand and run. Let’s go through what’s happening step by step.

absorptions[^]:

As told in a previous post, I like to watch the RDS-TMC traffic messages every now and then, just for fun. Even though I've never had a car. Actually I haven't done it for years now, but thought I'd share with you the joy of solving the enigma. RDS-TMC is used in car navigators to inform the driver about traffic jams, roadworks and urgent stuff like that. It's being broadcast on a subcarrier of a public radio FM transmission. It's encrypted in many countries, including mine, so that it could be monetized by selling the encryption keys.

TUAW[^]:

The Jawbone UP fitness tracker is a lot more useful now that Jawbone has opened the API to third-party developers. One of the most exciting companies tapping into the UP platform is online automation tool, IFTTT. In the article below, I will talk a little bit about connecting your UP to IFTTT and then list some of my favorite recipes.

profserious[^]:

I read scientific biographies hopeful that I might understand how they achieved scientific greatness, in order obviously, that I might emulate it. The outcome is, inevitably, that I better appreciate just how exceptional the individuals are and how unlikely any strategy dependent upon emulation might be. Only one practical lesson shines through, the requirement for a sustained and unblinking focus on a challenge that is worthy of the effort that must be devoted to it. Scientific greatness is earned, but it is also chosen.

hilarymason.com[^]:

It’s a challenge to present deeply technical material to a room of people with varying expertise levels. If you leave it out, you’re abandoning the substance of your presentation. If you focus on it exclusively, you will lose most of the room.

Business Insider[^]:

The elite of the tech world have decided that Google Glass is the future. And perhaps they're right, but, Google Glass is clearly not the present. It's not even the near-future, if the early reviews that are rolling in turn out to be accurate.... After reading all the reviews, and talking to people who actually wore Glass, I just see a product plagued by bugs, and of questionable use, that's generating a lot of buzz because people want so desperately to have some new gadget to latch onto, and fear being wrong about the next major technology trend.

Quote:

Inspired by the common fly, the carbon fibre robot has a wingspan of three centimetres and weighs less than a tenth of a gram.

John Papa[^]:

Stressing over your upcoming presentation where you have to type a bunch of code from memory or from a script? AutoHotKey can help you automate much of the “writing” of the code so you can write demos on the fly. AutoHotKey does so much more, but for a quick and simple way to write demos on the fly, it really is top-notch.

Learning by Shipping[^]:

“Slipping” or missing the intended completion or milestone date of software projects is as old as software itself. There’s a rich history of our industry tracking intended v. actual ship dates and speculating as to the length of the slip and the cause. Even with all this history, slipping is a complex and nuanced topic worth a bit of discussion about slipping as an engineering concept.

Ars Technica[^]:

In the semiconductor world, integration is omnipresent, driven by Moore’s Law. Integration reduces power and cost while increasing performance. The latest realization of this trend is the System-on-a-Chip (SoC) approach pervasive among PCs, tablets, and smartphones. And the latest SoC is Haswell. Haswell is the first new family of SoCs from Intel to target the 22nm FinFET process, which uses a non-planar transistor that wraps around the gate on three sides. While Ivy Bridge was the first family of 22nm products, it was not fully optimized for the 22nm process. The CPU was a shrink of the 32nm Sandy Bridge rather than a new design.

ReadWrite[^]:

If you want to know the most in-demand tech skills, that info is readily available. Want to learn the programming skills most coveted by employers? Done. But what are the skills and specialties that no one wants any more? What core competencies raise red flags instead of call backs?