The Insider News

Jimmy Bogard[^]:

One of the mistakes I see people make (and have made myself) is assuming that you must choose exactly one ORM strategy for an entire database/application/system. It’s simply not the case. You can (and should) tailor your ORM strategy to your use case, and make sure you’re picking the right tool (or feature of the tool) for the job.

Technology Review[^]:

Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have devised a framework for running large-scale computations for tasks such as social network or Web search analysis efficiently on a single personal computer. The new software, called GraphChi, exploits the capacious hard drives that are becoming ever more common in personal computers. A graph would normally be stored in temporary memory (RAM) for analysis. With GraphChi, the hard drive performs this task instead.

Hello, Savants![^]:

First of all we put our computers away. The tools to become a programmer are paper, pens, tape, candy, ping-pong balls, wooden boxes, cups and other common objects. We start from 0, so we have to tell some stories about numbers, and how influenced by your knowledge of numbers. Erase all you know, start learning to count and move on, through short stories, anecdotes, parallels, trial and error.

The Atlantic[^]:

"One small step for a man," would not be the iconic line it is today if it hadn't been captured on video, for millions of Earthlings to watch as the first human set foot on the moon. Shooting live video on moon was "crucial for credibility of the mission," but posed a serious logistical challenge. Westinghouse engineer Stan Lebar, who was the program manager of the Apollo TV Lunar Camera project, was tasked with developing energy-efficient cameras that would withstand temperatures of plus or minus 250 degrees.

DesignSpark[^]:

The GA144 from GreenArrays is a highly novel 144 core processor that combines high performance with low power consumption. This post covers initial experiences with breadboarding the GA144 and using the Forth IDE to drive its I/O.

Ars Technica[^]:

Enyo was originally the official development framework of webOS, the platform that HP obtained in its 2010 acquisition of Palm and later destroyed during Leo Apotheker’s rein of imbecility. Meg Whitman, who replaced Apotheker as CEO, decided to salvage the remaining value of webOS by opening the source code and building a community around the software.

Math ∩ Programming[^]:

It’s often said that the Age of Information began on August 17, 1964 with the publication of Cooley and Tukey’s paper, “An Algorithm for the Machine Calculation of Complex Fourier Series.” They published a landmark algorithm which has since been called the Fast Fourier Transform algorithm, and has spawned countless variations. Indeed, their work was revolutionary because so much of our current daily lives depends on efficient signal processing.

Computerworld[^]:

Harvard University scientists are working on an Iron Man-like smart suit that could improve soldiers' endurance in war zones.
The university received a $2.6 million research grant for the project from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the research arm of the U.S. Department of Defense.
The suit, which is expected to include sensors and its own energy source, will be designed to delay the onset of fatigue, enabling soldiers to travel further in the field, while also supporting the body and protecting it from injuries when the soldier is carrying heavy loads.

IT News[^]:

An international effort by spam fighters has taken down the infamous Grum botnet, slashing in half the worldwide amount of spam email.

Grum's last servers were taken offline in Russia on Wednesday, effectively killing the botnet that has no fallback mechanism, said Atif Mushtaq, a researcher at FireEye's security lab, which collaborated with the Russian Computer Security Incident Response Team and the Spamhouse Project in battling Grum.

New York Times[^]:

SEATTLE — An accounting charge related to Microsoft’s ill-fated acquisition of an online advertising business led to a loss for the software giant’s last quarter, its first in more than two decades as a public company.

Chris Patterson[^]:

Benchmarque (pronounced bench-mar-key) allows you to create comparative benchmarks using .NET. An example of a comparative benchmark would be evaluating two or more approaches to performing an operation, such as whether for(), foreach(), or LINQ is faster at enumerating an array of items. While this example often falls into the over-optimization category, there are many related algorithms that may warrant comparison when cycles matter.

ImperialViolet[^]:

HTTPS tends to cause people to give talks mocking certificate security and the ecosystem around it. Perhaps that's well deserved, but that's not what this talk is about. If you want to have fun at the expense of CAs, dig up one of Moxie's talks. This talk deals with the fact that your HTTPS site, and the sites that you use, probably don't even reach the level where you get to start worrying about certificates.

One Unicorn[^]:

As you have probably heard the Entity Framework source code is now available under an open source license. This means that the EF team are ready and excited to take your contributions. The process for getting and building the EF code and for making contributions are documented on the EF CodePlex site. This series does not cover that information again but instead gives some context to help you in working with the code. This is the same kind of information that you would get if you joined the EF team.

corkami[^]:

This graphic is a walkthrough of a simple windows executable, that shows its dissected structure and explains how it's loaded by the operating system.