The Insider News

Canonical has put out a call for more Ubuntu application developers, possibly highlighting a lack of traction in this area just one day before such a gap was pointed out by a competitor.

The Code Project[^]:

We want to know what kinds of web development you're doing and what kinds of tools and technologies are important to your work. Fill out this survey and enter to win a $25 Amazon gift card.

Inside 233[^]:

Some people say it's an important skill to read the code. But is it really?

Ariya Hidayat[^]:

After you’ve seen the chart of JavaScript keywords distribution, it’s time to go a bit deeper to the syntax level. This time let’s find out the most popular JavaScript statements.

good coders code, great reuse[^]:

I was implementing password authentication for VNC in node.js the other day and faced a problem where it would just never successfully authenticate. I checked my implementation several times and it seemed fine. Then I tried to implement it in Python just to see if I was missing something obvious. Let's go to the code and see what's happening.

Elegant Code[^]:

There was a time when I thought it might be worth it to try and create a Software Professional Code of Ethics. Here's what I came up with.

Paracode[^]:

You might or might not have heard about the 501 manifesto. A 501 programmer is the one that runs out of the office at 5:01, regardless of any importance of him staying and keep his responsibilities aligned. The addendum of pitying open source or programmers who love what they’re doing is pretty insulting. We (programmers) are a culture now, and usually the passionate ones are the ones that are being mocked.

I, Cringely[^]:

Today at IBM the US workers who try to save the business are the first in line to lose their jobs. Management accountability is gone. The people who mess up get to keep their jobs; and those trying to retain the business lose their jobs. How fair is that?

The Atlantic[^]:

Think of all the data humans have collected over the long history of astronomy, from the cuneiform tablets of ancient Babylon to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. If we could express all of that data as a number of bits, our fundamental unit of information, that number would be, well, astronomical. But that's not all: in the next year that number is going to double, and the year after that it will double again, and so on and so on.

The Endeavour[^]:

What is randomness? Nobody knows, or at least there’s no consensus. Everybody has some vague ideas what randomness is, but when you dig into it deeply enough you find all kinds of philosophical quandaries.

Smashing Magazine[^]:

There has been a long-running war going on over the mobile Web: it can be summarized with the following question: “Is there a mobile Web?” That is, is the mobile device so fundamentally different that you should make different websites for it, or is there only one Web that we access using a variety of different devices?

Need for Air[^]:

The game of go is very interesting from an AI programmer’s point of view, because of how difficult it is to make a computer compete against a strong human and how researchers approached the problem. Paradoxically, the use of randomly played games has helped computers get much stronger.

The Code Project[^]:

In this installment we talk to Kate Gregory, long-time C++ developer, trainer and consultant.

Software Quality Connection[^]:

Every developer faces a situation wherein an application requires an update—for code the developer didn’t write. It’s not that the other developer purposely created a hard-to-maintain application. It’s that you don’t know the other developer’s thought process in putting the application together, making it difficult for you to figure the code out without some help. This article provides some tips to ease the pain and get you started more quickly.

LukeW[^]:

In his On Long Noses, Sampling, Synthesis, Design and Innovation presentation Bill Buxton discussed the origin of new technologies and the implications of that process on designers. Here are my notes from his talk.

Devlicio.us[^]:

I started work with “Xaml-based” platforms in the pre-Beta days of WPF, so I’ve been working with this technology longer than most. Back then I was utterly awed and inspired by it’s capabilities. Today I’m frustrated and sometimes outraged.

Mindscape Blog[^]:

Dataflow programming is a style that describes your data processing as data flowing through a graph of operations, in contrast to the usual imperative processing style. It invites you to think of data operations as a collection of black boxes, linked together by a runtime which takes care of moving data from one box to the next.