The Insider News

We may say we hate Mondays, but research suggests Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are equally loathed.

Learn Code The Hard Way[^]:

Coding mores cripple programmers by making it so they can't work in other languages. You see it all the time, where a programmer comes to a new language and drags all his previous language's coding styles and social mores with him. You also see how it frustrates them and deters them from attempting the new language. You'll see Java programmers freak out that there's no braces in Python code. You'll see Python programmers freak out that there's magic in Ruby code. You'll see Ruby programmers freak out that there's inconsistency in Python method usage.

verite.co[^]:

The human computer interface helps to define computing at any one time. As computers have become more mainstream the interfaces have become more intimate. This is the journey of computer technology and how it has come to touch all of our lives.

fantasai 54[^]:

It's hard to understand the work that goes into designing and building a layout system if you don't actually work on one—the expected results are so obvious, it seems simple; but the calculations that go into it involve a lot of details. Chapter 10 of CSS2.1, which deals only with calculating widths and heights of elements (and doesn't even touch margin collapsing or floats and clearance or even tables) runs 18 pages long and is the output of many, many hours of excruciatingly detailed technical discussion over more than a decade. And people still find errors in it, nevermind in the browser engines that supposedly implement it. So layout is hard. And layout for the Web is harder. Let's talk about why.

Paul Irish[^]:

One of the good things about having the eyeballs of many people is that you now have the ability to throw other people into the limelight that completely deserve to be in it. Divya Manian and I have been, for a while now, putting together a list of people in the front-end development community who, in our opinion, could use more broad acknowledgment and attention.

Localised JavaScript[^]:

JavaScript is an English programming language. If you're a native English speaker, this is fine and dandy. But 95% of the World's population aren't native English speakers. For us, learning JavaScript starts with an intensive foreign language course. In some countries you need to learn a second alphabet as well. Imagine having to learn a few hundred words of Arabic just to make a web page. This translator works by substituting defined keywords and identifiers for their translated versions. It's not perfect, but it's surprisingly comfortable.

4chan[^]:

This community has accomplished remarkable things. You have all impacted the Internet, mainstream culture, and history in a profound way. It has truly been a privilege and great honor to be a partcipant and witness to it all. I can honestly say I wouldn't trade these past eight and a half years for anything in the world. And for that, you all have my thanks. But... Where do we go from here?

Ars Technica[^]:

Before the 'Net, Finland created a primetime program-sharing radio service. "If you wrote a piece of code in a computer, saved it on a [Commodore] C-cassette, took that cassette out and listened to it with an ordinary cassette recorder, you heard sounds," Lehtonen explained. "But as sounds could be copied to another tape and as sounds could be transmitted over radio, then why should it not be possible to receive even these sounds of the code, record them with a C-cassette recorder and have the recorded sounds do their trick in another computer?" In other words—why couldn't you distribute code by simply playing it over the radio while enthusiasts taped it for later use?

samizdat.cc[^]:

Interactive gamebooks started to appear in the late 70s, around the same time that Interactive Fiction popped into existence with Colossal Cave Adventure (which begat Zork and, in turn, Infocom). Whether in paper or electronic form, these games all hinge upon movement through a set of static locations: pages in the book, or ‘rooms’ in the text adventure. And from any one of these locations you can move to a new one based on a set of fixed rules. This sort of locations-and-transitions structure is known in computer science jargon as a finite state machine. So if the CYOA books are just another FSM, it should be possible to use some of the same techniques to examine their structure.

codeface[^]:

I keep seeing tweets and blog posts and articles in journals I respect expressing the worry that Windows 8 is going to be “another Vista” or “another ME”, as though there were a rule that every other Windows release has to be a turkey. Thus I am compelled to post this, by way of respectful disagreement with these idiots. I’ll get onto why I don’t think Windows 8 is, or will be, a failure, but I’ll start by asking this question: Was Windows 7 a success?

American Scientist[^]:

Alice and Bob, fondly known as the first couple of cryptography, are really more interested in computational suitcases than physical ones. Suppose Alice gives Bob a securely encrypted computer file and asks him to sum a list of numbers she has put inside. Without the decryption key, this task also seems impossible. The encrypted file is just as opaque and impenetrable as the locked suitcase. “Can’t be done,” Bob concludes again. But Bob is wrong. Because Alice has chosen a very special encryption scheme, Bob can carry out her request. He can compute with data he can’t inspect. Here's how it works.