The Insider News

Secure Mac Programming[^]:

We have this trope in programming that you should hate the code you wrote six months ago. This is a figurative way of saying that you should be constantly learning and assimilating new ideas, so that you can look at what you were doing earlier this year and have new ways of doing it. It would be more accurate, though less visceral, to say “you should be proud that the code you wrote six months ago was the best you could do with the knowledge you then had, and should be able to ways to improve upon it with the learning you’ve accomplished since then”.

Channel 9[^]:

This session provides an overview of several Sysinternals tools, including Process Monitor, Process Explorer, and Autoruns, focusing on the features useful for malware analysis and removal. These utilities enable deep inspection and control of processes, file system and registry activity, and autostart execution points. You will see demos for their malware-hunting capabilities through several real-world cases that used the tools to identify and clean malware, and conclude by performing a live analysis of a Stuxnet infection’s system impact.

DaedTech[^]:

You can offer too much code. By this I mean something subtly but critically different from “you can write too much code,” as when you are needlessly complicated or verbose. Offering too much code means that you’re giving users of the public interface of your classes too many options. Before my TDD days, this was something with which I constantly struggled.

Tomek's blog[^]:

Oh yeah, I hear you, I hear you. "My StringUtils class, has this toUppercase() method and I test this very method, right?" Well, not really. What you really test is the functionality that the StringUtils provides, and because this functionality is so trivial that it fits within one method, this makes you think that you test a method. But in reality you test a functionality.

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?