The Insider News

Christian Heilmann[^]:

So next time you find yourself feeling the need to exercise the right to complain – or just feel like venting – spend some time finding the right person to complain to. A lot of times you find your anger is less than you initially think it is and many a time you will find that you did something wrong in the first place.

Gamasutra[^]:

While developers are incredibly intelligent, they can sometimes be a bit insecure about how smart they are compared to their peers. I've seen developer message boards tear apart billion-dollar franchises, indie darlings, and everything in between by overanalyzing and nitpicking. We always want to prove that we thought of an idea before anyone else, or we will cite a case in which an idea has been attempted, succeeded, failed, or been played out. In short, this article identifies communication techniques that are often used in discussions, arguments, and debates among game developers in order to "win" said conversations.

I'm Just Being Manan[^]:

These are 8 issues I hoped wouldn’t have made their way into the final build. Having said that, within a few hours of installing, I completely switched to W8 on my Air as my primary OS. It’s beautiful, quick and Windows.

The Scholarly Kitchen[^]:

People have always culled personal libraries, of course, but the process is different in the age of the e-book. The literary classics that fill an entire book case are now all available electronically, most of them for free. Why carry “A Hazard of New Fortunes” or “The Brothers Karamazov” around when they can always be recalled from the Cloud, loaded onto a Kindle or the virtual shelf of the iBookstore?

The Observer[^]:

Fifty years ago this month, one of the most influential books of the 20th century was published by the University of Chicago Press. Many if not most lay people have probably never heard of its author, Thomas Kuhn, or of his book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but their thinking has almost certainly been influenced by his ideas. The litmus test is whether you've ever heard or used the term "paradigm shift", which is probably the most used – and abused – term in contemporary discussions of organisational change and intellectual progress.

CNET News[^]:

Your PC may not need a faster network, but overall data usage on the Web is doubling every year. The big question: Can the venerable Ethernet standard handle a terabit per second?

We may say we hate Mondays, but research suggests Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are equally loathed.

Learn Code The Hard Way[^]:

Coding mores cripple programmers by making it so they can't work in other languages. You see it all the time, where a programmer comes to a new language and drags all his previous language's coding styles and social mores with him. You also see how it frustrates them and deters them from attempting the new language. You'll see Java programmers freak out that there's no braces in Python code. You'll see Python programmers freak out that there's magic in Ruby code. You'll see Ruby programmers freak out that there's inconsistency in Python method usage.

verite.co[^]:

The human computer interface helps to define computing at any one time. As computers have become more mainstream the interfaces have become more intimate. This is the journey of computer technology and how it has come to touch all of our lives.

fantasai 54[^]:

It's hard to understand the work that goes into designing and building a layout system if you don't actually work on one—the expected results are so obvious, it seems simple; but the calculations that go into it involve a lot of details. Chapter 10 of CSS2.1, which deals only with calculating widths and heights of elements (and doesn't even touch margin collapsing or floats and clearance or even tables) runs 18 pages long and is the output of many, many hours of excruciatingly detailed technical discussion over more than a decade. And people still find errors in it, nevermind in the browser engines that supposedly implement it. So layout is hard. And layout for the Web is harder. Let's talk about why.

Paul Irish[^]:

One of the good things about having the eyeballs of many people is that you now have the ability to throw other people into the limelight that completely deserve to be in it. Divya Manian and I have been, for a while now, putting together a list of people in the front-end development community who, in our opinion, could use more broad acknowledgment and attention.

Localised JavaScript[^]:

JavaScript is an English programming language. If you're a native English speaker, this is fine and dandy. But 95% of the World's population aren't native English speakers. For us, learning JavaScript starts with an intensive foreign language course. In some countries you need to learn a second alphabet as well. Imagine having to learn a few hundred words of Arabic just to make a web page. This translator works by substituting defined keywords and identifiers for their translated versions. It's not perfect, but it's surprisingly comfortable.