The Insider News

Math ∩ Programming[^]:

Here's a thorough and rigorous introduction to the study of the complexity of strings. What we would really love to do is be able to look at a string of binary digits and decide how “random” it is. And yet, by the immutable laws of probability, we cannot speak of how random one particular outcome of an experiment is. We need a new notion that overcomes this difficulty.

Queness[^]:

Firefox, thanks in part to the indespensible Firebug extension, has long been a crucial tool for web developers. But Chrome is fast, sleek and has its own vast array of free extensions. Here are a few that make it equally useful for web devs.

BBC[^]:

The ZX Spectrum is 30 years old. The successor to Sir Clive Sinclair's ZX81 - at the time the world's best selling consumer computer - it introduced colour "high resolution" graphics and sound.

iotic.com[^]:

This is the story of the creation of a new font, Avería: the average of all the fonts on my computer. The field of typography has long fascinated me, and I love playing with creative programming ideas, so it was perhaps inevitable that the idea came to me one day of “generative typography”.

Design.org[^]:

Ever met someone who uses UX and UI interchangeably? Ed Lea created this photographic infographic to visually define the differences between user experience and user interface design and how they relate to a product.

The Next Web[^]:

I’ve learned a lot from the development of NameLayer, and I’m ready to divulge every trick in my arsenal. In this guide, I provide realistic solutions to the frustrations encountered when naming a company. Plus, I’ll have some fun analyzing both good and bad company names.

2D Goggles[^]:

What started as a punchline to a one-shot comic – hey, wouldn’t it be hilarious if there was a comic about Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage fighting crime? – has evolved into... well, a really really long punchline. With footnotes! And now it's a book, too.

SharpGIS[^]:

I love working on API design and have been fortunate enough to be able to do this for several years now on a daily basis. Over time, I have built myself a couple of mantras when I work on an API, and it generally is about how ‘tight’ or ‘loose’ you design your API.

MSDN Blogs[^]:

Getting started with game design is at best confusing. Should you learn XNA? Yes. Should you learn XAML? Yes Should you learn DirectX? Yes. Well that wasn’t very confusing was it? Let’s take a look at the list of technology and information sources.

Kael Rowan[^]:

Current developer tools for the web are even more in need of the types of benefits that Code Canvas aims to provide, and this new target audience is a prime candidate for continuing the research where we left off and exploring the new research aspects that we haven’t touched yet. Here is a list of the features we’ve explored and a sampling of the kinds of topics we’d like to research in the future.

Smashing Coding[^]:

For years, the Web standards community has talked about the separation of concerns. CSS Zen Garden proved that we can alter a design into a myriad of permutations simply by changing the CSS. However, we’ve rarely seen the flip side of this — the side that is more likely to occur in a project: the HTML changes. We modify the HTML and then have to go back and revise any CSS that goes with it.

H. Smeitink[^]:

Most people with an xbox 360 know of the modded Xbox controllers, the simplest versions of these mods simply add a rapid fire function to you controller. The more advanced ones even let you program the microcontroller that you add to the controller so that you can use the newest button glitches. But nobody seemed to have made a piece of hardware that makes you control your Xbox with your pc, thereby giving you full control and easy configuration options.

VentureBeat[^]:

Technology teaches us to forget the past. Last year’s tech news seems like it has no use whatsoever. Thankfully, historians beg to differ, and they have begun to preserve the history of the tech industry as it becomes more and more important to the evolution of our lives and world. Those who understand the history of technology and the people who made it happen can probably figure out more quickly how to build on the shoulders of giants and advance technology further.

guardian.co.uk[^]:

From politicians and professors to computer scientists and the first programmer, these are the champions of the open internet.

Tobias Bjerrome Ahlin[^]:

Designers love to hate skeuomorphism. It’s just decoration, they say. It’s completely useless. It will go out of style. Yet Apple and many other software developers continue to use it heavily in some of their apps. Many hate without asking: Why?

8th Light[^]:

Tasks that appear easy for a human to solve are often described by complex procedures. So when estimating, make sure you aren’t affected by the apparent ease of that task. Look below the surface to try to enumerate the number of procedural elements. And if anyone tries to tell you that your estimate is bogus because the task is so simple, ask them to write down the procedure for tying their shoes.

Peter Provost[^]:

I’ve always been someone who likes regularly rebuilding my Windows machines. I know this isn’t needed as much as it used to be, but I still find myself starting to get that itch anywhere from 6-weeks to 3-months after I last flattened the box. Here are some simple tools that make the process much easier.

 2012 is poised to go down in Internet history as one of the most significant 12-month periods from both a technical and policy perspective since the late 1990s, when this network-of-networks stopped being a research project and became an engine of economic growth. 

This year the Internet will face several milestones as it undergoes its biggest-ever technical upgrade, from Internet Protocol version 4 to version 6. In addition, key contracts that the U.S. federal government controls for Internet infrastructure and operations are being re-bid. Taken together, these events could result in monumental changes in both who operates the Internet infrastructure as well as how these operations are handled:

1. The root servers may have a new operator

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has overseen the operation of the Internet root servers since the non-profit was founded in 1998. However, ICANN's contract is due to expire in March, and a new U.S.-based organization could end up in charge of this critical technical function.

The Internet's 13 root server farms are at the top of the DNS hierarchy, which matches domain names with their corresponding IP addresses for looking up Web sites. The operation of the root server farms is overseen by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which reports to ICANN.

Instead of renewing ICANN's contract for the IANA function, the U.S. government has opened up the bid to other U.S.-based organizations. On Nov. 10, 2011, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) issued an open bid for the IANA function. Bids were due Dec. 12 and a contract is expected to be awarded in the first quarter of this year. The new contract for the IANA function will last from April 1, 2012 until March 31, 2015.

2. A new company could operate the .com registry

Verisign has operated the .com domain since 1999. The .com domain is the Internet's most popular top-level domain, with about 100 million .com names registered as of last month. To put this figure in perspective, the Internet has a total of 220 million domain names registered in 280 top-level domains. The number of .com names dwarfs every other domain: It's more than five times greater than those registered in the second most popular extension, which is Germany's .de.

Verisign signed an agreement with ICANN on March 1, 2006 to operate .com, and that contract expires on Nov. 30, 2012.

One positive indicator for Verisign: Last June, ICANN renewed the company's contract to operate the .net registry, which has about 12 million registered names. Verisign will run the .net registry until 2017.

3. Up to 1,000 new top-level domains will start being introduced

ICANN plans to launch a new program Jan. 12 to add hundreds of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) such as .hotel and .paris to the Internet. This controversial plan has been under discussion for six years, and it is finally scheduled to begin. ICANN's new gTLD programrepresents the biggest change to the Internet's naming system since 1998, when ICANN was formed.

ICANN has run two previous efforts to expand the Internet domain name space: once in 2000, when it added seven extensions including .biz and .info; and again in 2004, when it added eight more extensions such as .asia and .jobs. None of these new domain name extensions has been particularly successful.

However, if ICANN's latest attempt to expand the domain name space succeeds, it could fundamentally change the way domain names are used. Among the new categories of names that are expected to be approved include: internationalized domain names in non-English language scripts; geographically oriented domains for cities and regions; domain names tied to specific interests as well as domain names tied to individual companies and brands.

[Read Network World's other predictions for 2012]

4. An additional 10,000 Web sites will support IPv6

Sept. 30, 2012 is the deadline for all U.S. federal government agencies to support IPv6 on their public-facing Web sites and Web services. An estimated 10,000 Web sites fall under this mandate, which could help drive IPv6 deployment in the United States during the next 12 months.

Established by the Obama Administration two years ago, the federal IPv6 mandate also requires agencies to upgrade internal client applications that communicate with public Internet servers to use native IPv6. But agencies have another two years - until September 2014 - to meet this second deadline. Federal agencies are required to designate an IPv6 transition manager and to purchase network hardware and software that complies with the federal government's IPv6 testing process.

IPv6 features an expanded addressing scheme that can support billions of devices connected directly to the Internet. But IPv6 is not backwards compatible with IPv4, which is running out of addresses. Network operators can either support both protocols in what's called dual-stack mode or translate between IPv4 and IPv6, which could add latency and overhead cost.

5. Europe will run out of IPv4 addresses 

The European regional Internet registry - RIPE - is expected to run out of IPv4 addresses in 2012. Geoff Huston, adjunct research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Internet Architectures at Swinburne University of Technology, estimates that RIPE will run out of its remaining IPv4 address space on July 22, 2012.

In April 2011, Asia depleted all of its IPv4 address space except a small fraction held in reserve for start-up network operators. The North American registry is expected to deplete its IPv4 address space in 2013.

The depletion of IPv4 addresses in various regions of the world will put more pressure on U.S. carriers and enterprises to begin transitioning their networks to IPv6. For example, Comcast has said it will offer production-quality IPv6 services across its nationwide network in 2012.

By Carolyn Duffy Marsan

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.