The Insider News

Alex Sexton[^]:

So someone shoulder-taps you and asks you to explain the concepts behind JavaScript Inheritance to them. In my eyes you’ve got a few options.... Sometimes these analogies get pretty crazy in my head, and I start to think that maybe instead of trying to apply known examples in the outside world in order to help people understand, it’s often better to just let someone know why they might wanna use inheritance in their programs!

Tech.Pro[^]:

I've been doing this programming thing for a long time now (8 professional years), and during that time I have accumulated a lot opinions (some are right, some are probably wrong). In this phase of my career I am looking at what programming constructs can I use to make my life easier. One thing that sticks out to me as a sore point is the keyword void.... To state it simply, void is useful when I want to perform an action on an object and don't expect a result returned. In theory it sounds great, but if I don't expect a single result back, I am most likely going to want to inspect the object itself, or perform another action on the object.

GigaOm[^]:

After a delay, the software development kit (SDK) for the Pebble smartwatch is now live. On Friday, the watch maker publicly released the SDK and documentation, which was originally scheduled for when the watches started shipping. This means that owners of the Pebble watch — one of the hottest KickStarter projects in 2012 with more than 68,000 backers — can soon look forward to applications for their timepiece.... For now, the SDK appears to support custom watch faces but will be expanded for functional applications.

endjin blog[^]:

Once upon a time, we maybe started out with Logo to understand simple command sequencing, or BASIC – both, you’ll note, frequently provided with interpreters or REPL-type environments which are great to learn in. For a while, PASCAL was a popular learning language on University courses – in fact, it was designed by Niklaus Wirth precisely to help educate people about the whacky ‘new’ ideas that we should organize our programs in structured blocks, with subroutines, and loops and things.

MSDN Magazine[^]:

It’s important to note it’s of utmost importance that when we capture Important Business Logic, we do so with gravitas and sincerity; this means doing so in a language that the business owners and customer representatives (and most of the marketing department) can understand. So, it’s with a grave and sincere demeanor that I present to you an important language in your .NET programming toolbox: LOLCODE.

Forecast Blog[^]:

Why aren’t there more high quality mobile web apps that have the look, feel, and performance of their native counterparts? I don’t think the reason is a technical one. Granted, some apps must be native: OpenGL-based games, for example, or apps that access hardware capabilities that are not yet exposed to the browser (a shrinking list); but I don’t buy the argument that native SDKs allow you to create interfaces that are inherently better, smoother, more dynamic — or more delightful — than what is possible via HTML5.

Bruce Lawson[^]:

The web platform has advanced out of all recognition, and continues to evolve at a frankly bewildering pace (I’m paid to keep track of all this stuff, and if I take a fortnight’s holiday I scramble to get back on top of it). Four years ago, if you wanted to access your device’s GPS information, you pretty much had to use a native app; now, the W3C Geolocation API is available in all browsers, on most classes of devices. The advancement of what the press likes to call “HTML5″ (but mostly isn’t just HTML5) is closing the gap between the capabilities of native and web. But it isn’t there yet.

The Endeavour[^]:

Unicode is supported everywhere, but font support for Unicode characters is sparse. When you use any slightly uncommon character, you have no guarantee someone else will be able to see it.... So what characters can you count on nearly everyone being able to see? To answer this question, I looked at the characters in the intersection of several common fonts: Verdana, Georgia, Times New Roman, Arial, Courier New, and Droid Sans. My thought was that this would make a very conservative set of characters.

Ars Technica[^]:

Have a plan to steal millions from banks and their customers but can't write a line of code? Want to get rich quick off advertising click fraud but "quick" doesn't include time to learn how to do it? No problem. Everything you need to start a life of cybercrime is just a few clicks (and many more dollars) away.

Digiday[^]:

Back in the fall of 1994, Bill Clinton was nearly midway through his first term, Ace of Base was at the top of the charts, and the Web was in its infancy. Businesses were just waking up to the power of the Internet as a commercial platform. In California, the staff at Hotwired — the Internet offshoot of Wired — contemplated how exactly to pay the writers it hired. The idea arrived to create a dozen sections that would carry “banner” advertising. This wasn’t entirely original. Early Web service Prodigy had used similar methods, although it placed its banners at the bottom of the screen. (This led to the first ad blocker; a piece of plastic affixed to the bottom of monitors to obscure the dreaded advertising.)

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there is an on going and highly distributed, global attack on wordpress installations to crack open admin accounts and inject various malicious scripts