The Insider News

jack.minardi.org[^]:

I was having fun casting shadows with my laser pointer the other day. I began to wonder about the 3D information that was embedded in the 2D shadow. Given enough shadows of an object, could you recreate it? What information is lost, what is preserved?

Stephanie Rieger[^]:

Having spent some time with Firefox OS last week, I thought I would share some thoughts on the platform, and a few key aspects of the user experience.... I do have reservations regarding the occasionally overtly prescriptive definitions of a “mobile web app” (i.e. single page, JavaScript heavy, transition and gesture enabled), but am also interested in seeing how things play out. If FFOS does well, it may prove the first large scale investigation of just where the app/site threshold lies from a purely user-facing perspective.

Hack a Day[^]:

This little device is about the size of a webcam, and it perches on top of your computer monitor in much the same way. It’s Disney’s solution to haptic feedback for gestural input. That is to say, wave your hands in the air to control a computer, and this will give you some sense of actually touching the virtual objects.

DaveConroy.com[^]:

There are plenty of resources online about tethering the iPhone 5 with the graphical interface, but I wanted to be able ‘hotswap’ my Raspberry Pi’s Internet connection without command line, and without the graphical interface. Plug and play, essentially. I was able to get this working last night using Raspian (a free operating system based on Debian optimized for the Raspberry Pi hardware) and a few scripts.

Truncated CoDr's Blog[^]:

How do we get more “Diversity” (Women) in Technology? This question was beat to death at Codemash this year. TO DEATH.... But here’s the thing: the people asking these questions are the people making our community so great... the people passionate enough about technology to facilitate a way to share knowledge. They’re the people who are able to make a difference, and from what I’ve seen, they’re really trying. Those asking these questions aren’t asking to make us feel different. They’re asking because they are truly looking for an answer; an answer to a really hard question. What Can We Do? I have no idea what “we” can do, but I can tell you what I’m trying to do.

Polygon[^]:

Video game developers will be able to self-publish their Xbox Live Arcade titles on Xbox 360 without the need to go through a third-party publisher starting later this summer, according to an update from The Pinball Arcade developer FarSight Studios.

TechHive[^]:

Sony and Panasonic have announced their plans to create super powerful optical discs that will be able to store 300 GB of information! Can you hear the minds from 2003 being completely blown...? So, why an emphasis on optical discs now? The investment in optical storage may appear to be a somewhat odd choice in that we’ve already seen 1 terabyte flash drives—not to mention near limitless cloud-based storage options.

True Ventures[^]:

Almost exactly six years ago, Apple launched the first iPhone. It was a small device that many dismissed as a toy. In reality Steve put a supercomputer in our pocket — we just didn’t know it. And like super computers before, it came with immense capabilities and brought about an opportunity to rethink, reimagine and reinvent how we live, work, create and consume.... Cheap processors, cheaper memory, and even cheaper sensors means it’s a great time for people who like to tinker with hardware to tinker.

Ars Technica[^]:

Tampering with a car’s brakes and speed by hacking its computers: A new how-to
Among the attacks: suddenly engaging the brakes of the Prius, yanking its steering wheel, or causing it to accelerate. On the Escape, they can disable the brakes when the SUV is driving slowly. With an $80,000 grant from the DARPA Cyber Fast Track program, they have documented the cars' inner workings and included all the code needed to make the attacks work in the hopes of coming up with new ways to make vehicles that are more resistant to hacking.

TUAW[^]:

Google's developer preview SDK for Google Cast -- the streaming technology that's powering the Chromecast hardware -- is up and running. It looks like adding Google Cast support will be ridiculously easy with little coding overhead for anyone who wants to jump on the bandwagon.

Justin Abrahms[^]:

Big-O notation used to be a really scary concept for me. I thought this is how "real" programmers talked about their code. It was all the more scary because the academic descriptions (such as Wikipedia) made very little sense to me. This is frustrating because the underlying concepts aren't actually that hard. Simply put, Big-O notation is how programmers talk about algorithms. Algorithms are another scary topic...

Aha![^]:

The Alpha Engineer rules Silicon Valley and all great technology ecosystems. He holds the highest rank in technical communities worldwide and is rewarded with the greatest access to resources — which only leads to greater domination. Tough to find, he is a genius in thought, workhorse in productivity, and is worth 100 or more mediocre or lower skilled engineers.

Vik's Blog[^]:

Music has always fascinated me. It can make us feel emotions in a way few media can. Sadly, I have always been unable to play an instrument well. Generating music by computer lets me leverage one of my strengths, computer programming (which, contrary to popular belief, can be extremely creative), in order to make music.... I opted to pursue a strategy that “evolves” music out of other pieces of music. I chose this strategy in order to emphasize the process.

Locklin on science[^]:

One of the problems with modern computer technology: programmers don’t learn from the great masters. There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design. Modern programmers seem more familiar with Lady Gaga. It’s not just a matter of taste and an appreciation for genius. It’s a matter of forgetting important things.

Brendan's blog[^]:

When analyzing response time, or latency, you need much more information than an average provides. The average, commonly the arithmetic mean, shows the index of central tendency. But, as I found in earlier posts, the tendency is often not central, but may be skewed by outliers, or split by multiple modes. How often these factors occur was determined quantitatively, using tests and a survey of hundreds of production servers and different types of latency: over 95% had six-sigma outliers, and at least 20% had multiple modes.

The Australian Financial Review[^]:

Computers manufactured by the world’s biggest personal computer maker, Lenovo, have been banned from the “secret” and ‘‘top secret” ­networks of the intelligence and defence services of Australia, the US, Britain, Canada, and New Zealand, because of concerns they are vulnerable to being hacked.... The ban was introduced in the mid-2000s after intensive laboratory testing of its equipment allegedly documented “back-door” hardware and “firmware” vulnerabilities in Lenovo chips. A Department of Defence spokesman confirmed Lenovo ­products have never been accredited for Australia’s secret or top secret ­networks.