The Insider News

Tab Completion[^]:

CSS was written from the beginning to be very forgiving of errors. When the browser encounters something in a CSS file that it doesn't understand, it does a very minimal freak-out, then continues on as soon as it can as if nothing bad had happened.

Bitovi[^]:

Have you ever found yourself wishing jQuery had just one more feature or wanted it to be a tiny bit faster? I know I have, but I understand jQuery can’t do everything. This is why the team at Bitovi created me, a collection of extremely useful DOM helpers and special events that complement jQuery.

F-Secure[^]:

About 900 million Windows computers get their updates from Microsoft Update. In addition to the DNS root servers, this update system has always been considered one of the weak points of the net. Antivirus people have nightmares about a variant of malware spoofing the update mechanism and replicating via it. Turns out, it looks like this has now been done.

GigOm[^]:

A report that Microsoft will hold back on Office for iPad and Android devices until it’s safely ensconced on Windows 8 tablets and Windows phones illustrates Microsoft’s quandary in the tablet age.

Boing Boing[^]:

Radia "Mother of the Internet" Perlman and the ghosts of RADM Grace Hopper, Ada Lovelace and every woman who worked in technology for the past 150 years frown upon you, sir. Women may have been invisible, but the work we did laid the groundwork for more visible advancements now credited to more famous men.

Wired[^]:

Everyone uses search. If you’re like me, you use it all the time. Which means any time you type a query into that search field, you’re hit with a deluge of messages tangentially related to what you’re looking for. That needs to change, and the best way to do it is to adapt our emails accordingly.

The Atlantic[^]:

Of all the noises that my children will not understand, the one that is nearest to my heart is not from a song or a television show or a jingle. It's the sound of a modem connecting with another modem across the repurposed telephone infrastructure. It was the noise of being part of the beginning of the Internet.

Building Windows 8[^]:

For several years, the industry, including Microsoft, has been working to roll out a completely new version of the Internet Protocol – IPv6 – across various devices, services, and network infrastructure. Windows releases since Windows XP SP3 have supported IPv6, making the IPv6 transition possible. We have engineered Windows 8 to keep you (and your apps) reliably connected as this dramatic transition takes place.

SQLServerCentral[^]:

For the past few years, I have seen tens of sql server boxes added in my work environment every year, meaning more complexity and overhead cost in database administration, I gradually come to a “green” design principle with two points.

Software Engineering Tips[^]:

If you think you're missing any of the qualities below, don't be offended. I didn't pick these up for a while, either, and many of them came from watching other programmers or reading their code.

Design.Code.Learn.[^]:

Jeff Atwood recently wrote a brilliant blog post (that was really misunderstood) about how the world doesn’t need more coders. Even though I enjoy writing code, the goal, as Jeff says, shouldn’t be writing code for code’s sake. The lessons for me were simple: focus on understanding/finding a real problem and try to find a different way to solve it. This is often a good way to win.

Embedded in Academia[^]:

The C language's rules for integer operations have some quirks that can make even small programs behave in confusing ways. This post is a review of these rules in the form of a quiz containing 20 questions.

Linus Akesson[^]:

The TTY subsystem is central to the design of Linux, and UNIX in general. Unfortunately, its importance is often overlooked, and it is difficult to find good introductory articles about it. I believe that a basic understanding of TTYs in Linux is essential for the developer and the advanced user. Beware, though: What you are about to see is not particularly elegant. In fact, the TTY subsystem — while quite functional from a user's point of view — is a twisty little mess of special cases. To understand how this came to be, we have to go back in time.