The Insider News

Mason Smith - This Animated Life[^]:

No, literally. Pixar's lighting/rendering systems were completely redone for their new film Monsters University. In my correspondence with Chris, who studied Visualization at A&M and works in the Rendering dept at Pixar (see my interview with Chris about his work on Brave here) he mentioned his work on MU...

Scott Hanselman[^]:

Chocolately is a bootstrapper that uses PowerShell scripts and the NuGet packaging format to install apps for you. NuGet is the package management system that Windows Developers use to bring libraries down at the project level. Chocolatey (get it? Chocolatey Nu-Get?) extends that concept to bring applications down at the system level.

.NET Slave[^]:

When coding, I use both of my hands for typing and both my eyes fixed on the code I’m writing. When I don’t know a certain keyboard shortcut, I reach for the mouse and in doing so, look away from the main Visual Studio window. My hands stop typing. I’m not productive anymore. For me, being productive is the foundation of my developer happiness.... So why not try to increase our IO using sound? What if we could hear when the build brakes? What if we, using our voice, could tell our editor to format the document in case we forgot that keyboard shortcut? It seems like a perfectly reasonable idea to me. To experiment with this idea, I wrote two extensions for Visual Studio 2012.

8th Light[^]:

From a software development perspective, we use katas to build muscle memory, practice logical thought and teach ourselves familiar ideas but from a different perspective. Katas can stretch our abilities and, similar to how a kata would teach a martial artist to become comfortable with the uncomfortable, they help us write code we may not normally write.... Although katas are typically practiced in a private setting, at 8th Light we often perform katas, once perfected, live in front of an audience of peers. The goal of the kata performance, in this instance, is not to be considered a rite of passage or to demonstrate mastery of the material. Instead, as its name implies, it is simply a performance meant to entertain.

Ars Technica[^]:

In March, readers followed along as Nate Anderson, Ars deputy editor and a self-admitted newbie to password cracking, downloaded a list of more than 16,000 cryptographically hashed passcodes. Within a few hours, he deciphered almost half of them. The moral of the story: if a reporter with zero training in the ancient art of password cracking can achieve such results, imagine what more seasoned attackers can do. Imagine no more. We asked three cracking experts to attack the same list Anderson targeted and recount the results in all their color and technical detail Iron Chef style.

John Geer[^]:

These “small data” situations are actually pretty important. Every post has its first few votes, every website its first few visitors, and most businesses their first customers, but not all of them continue long enough to get lots of data. Even in very large data sets, say visitors to a search engine, specific situations often have small amounts of data, like the probability that a visitor searching for “an image of a hippopotamus on a hill at sunset” will be pleased with the results. Each individual small data situation may not matter much. However, there are tons of these situations. Together they matter.

NYTimes.com[^]:

OUR mobile carriers know our locations: where our phones travel during working hours and leisure time, where they reside overnight when we sleep. Verizon Wireless even sells demographic profiles of customer groups — including ZIP codes for where they “live, work, shop and more” — to marketers. But when I called my wireless providers, Verizon and T-Mobile, last week in search of data on my comings and goings, call-center agents told me that their companies didn’t share customers’ own location logs with them without a subpoena.

Framebase[^]:

There are a lot of video containers out there: avi, mp4, ogg, flv, mkv, etc. One of the biggest headaches we’re trying to solve with Framebase is being able to upload any video and have it play across all browsers and devices without heavy reliance on Flash. When explaining Framebase, sometimes we get questions like, “Why can’t you just use the tag in HTML5?” As straightforward as that might seem, a lot of people don’t realize how much effort is required in providing an HTML5 video solution.

Hypercritical[^]:

If the idea of “winning” a console generation with laughably underpowered hardware wasn’t enough, the Wii and its contemporaries also put an end to the idea of a game console that just plays games. Just a few years after launch, all of the consoles—even the dainty, standard-definition Wii—supported some kind of social networking, photo viewing, and one or more video streaming services.... This was all a natural consequence of the decreased cost of storage and computation combined with the ubiquity of wireless networking. It was inevitable that any TV-connected box would eventually support these features. But it also means the Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and Wii U lack the clarity of purpose enjoyed by the previous generations of game consoles.

TUAW[^]:

The iPad's Camera Connection Kit is a remarkably talented accessory. With its standard USB connector plus a bit of ingenuity, clever folks have found all sorts of things to connect that would not ordinarily be expected to connect: headsets, keyboards and a variety of storage devices. You can even connect an iPhone to an iPad and import photos from one to the other.

Harvard Business Review[^]:

One of the most persistent misconceptions about mobile devices is that it's okay if they offer only a paltry subset of the content available on the desktop. Decision-makers argue that users only need quick, task-focused tools on their mobile devices, because the desktop will always be the preferred choice for more in-depth, information-seeking research. But what about people who don't have a desktop computer? What about people who have access to a PC, but prefer using their mobile device? Those users want and need access to the same information, just presented in a different form factor. The mobile-only user is your customer too.

Nettuts+[^]:

A developer evangelist fills an important role for a company. They serve as a communicator, a liason, a thoughful voice and more importantly, an integral part of the web development community. Few people encompass all of that as well as Christian Heilmann. Currently working as a principal technical evangelist at Mozilla, he’s literally written the book on developer envangelism and offers up some insightful nuggest on his work.

Eli Bendersky's website[^]:

One of the useful tools Node.js adds on top of standard ECMAScript is a notation for defining and using modules. A "module" exports objects and functions by adding them to exports, and another module can import it by using require. The semantics are explained well in the official documentation. While the documentation does a good job describing how require finds the module to import, it doesn’t say much about how the importing itself happens, and how the exports and module objects are magically visible and usable in the module’s code. Here I want to provide a lower-level view of this missing link, gleaned from the source code.

CatsWhoCode.com[^]:

Every web developer should keep useful code snippets in a personal library for future reference. Today, I’m showing you the 10 most useful snippets and functions I have added to my snippet library from the past 3 months.

Ben Lakey[^]:

I came to the JavaScript party much later than some of my colleagues but much earlier than most. I was told the best resource was Douglas Crockford’s book ‘JavaScript: The Good Parts‘ and was not disappointed. The book is thin and contains a minimal set of information needed to get you in a good state with JavaScript. While reading through it however I still found much of the book to be information I was already aware of, either with JavaScript syntax or basic programming concepts, and so I extracted those bits of knowledge that were most impactful against my existing knowledge level going in.

Happy Bear Software[^]:

Cryptography is perilous because you get no feedback when you mess up. For the average developer, one block of random base 64 encoded bytes is as good as any other. You can get good at programming by accident. If your code doesn't compile, doesn't do what you intended it to or has easily obvervable bugs, you get immediate feedback, you fix it and you make it better next time. You cannot get good at cryptography by accident.

Ars Technica[^]:

Right now, Bitcoin is undeniably a mainstream currency, even if it is not necessarily popular in the sense of being used by a significant proportion of society.... For many people, the risks—from fraud, for instance—are outweighed by the benefits. So let's say you're not convinced by Bitcoin as it is, but you still like Satoshi Nakamoto's idea of "an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third-party." Luckily for you, there are alternatives out there. Here are some of the more interesting ones, all forked from the original Bitcoin code.

Alan Winfield's Web Log[^]:

It depends on what you mean by mainstream. For a number of major industry sectors robotics is already mainstream. In assembly-line automation, for instance; or undersea oil well maintenance and inspection. You could argue that robotics is well established as the technology of choice for planetary exploration. And in human culture too, robots are already decidedly mainstream. Make believe robots are everywhere, from toys and children’s cartoons, to TV ads and big budget Hollywood movies. Robots are so rooted in our cultural landscape that public attitudes are, I believe, informed – or rather misinformed – primarily by fictional rather than real-world robots.

All this[^]:

My younger son could use some algebra practice. There are only so many problems in his book and making up new ones that have simple integer answers is harder and more time-consuming than you’d think. So, as with elementary math, I made up an HTML/JavaScript page that generates a new set of problems every time it’s (re)loaded. I print some out, have him do one or two, and go over them with him.

The Droid Guy[^]:

Google is officially closing down Buzz on July 17th, a considerable amount of time after it announced its future shutdown back in October 2011. Users of the social network, however, will still be able to read what they posted in the past, thanks to Google’s decision to move the data generated on Buzz to Google Drive.