The Insider News

ArsTechnica[^]

Nokia touts amazing phone camera, but exaggerates its abilities in staged shots.

latimes.com[^]:

Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeff Bezos served as his company's pitchman Thursday, introducing seven new or upgraded Kindle devices. But Bezos was a bit confusing with his introductions, so here's a guide to the new Kindles, their prices, release dates and their most important features.

Clemens Vasters[^]:

If you get thread-abort, out-of-memory, or stack-overflow exceptions thrown back at you, you don't want to suppress those. Once you run into these, your code has ignored all the red flags and exhausted its resources and whatever it was that you called didn't get its job done and likely sits there as a zombie in an undefined state. That class of exceptions is raining down your call stack like a shower of knife blades. They can't happen.

Miguel de Icaza[^]:

With our push to share the kernel of your software in reusable C# libraries and build a native experience per platform one component that is always missing is what about doing a web UI that also shares some of the code. Until very recently the answer was far from optimal, and included things like: put the kernel on the server and use some .NET stack to ship the HTML to the client. Today there are two solid choices to run your C# code on the browser and share code between the web and your native UIs.

The Pragmatic Bookshelf[^]:

Imagine an approach to programming where you write down some description of what your code should do, then before running your code you run some automatic tool to see if the code matches the description. That’s Test-driven development, you say! Actually, this is what you are doing when you use static types in most languages too. Types are a description of the code’s inputs and outputs, and the check ensures that inputs and outputs match up and are used consistently. Modern type systems—such as in Haskell or above—are very flexible, and allow these descriptions to be quite detailed; plus they are not too obtrusive in use and often very helpful.

Online JSON Viewer[^]:

JSON, short for JavaScript Object Notation, is a lightweight computer data interchange format. JSON is a text-based, human-readable format for representing simple data structures and associative arrays (called objects). Here's an interactive web tool for parsing JSON into human readable formats on the fly.

Marijn Haverbeke[^]:

CodeMirror is a code editor implemented in JavaScript. It relies on the browser to display its content, and modern browsers are very good at displaying text. But it also displays a cursor, and controls its movement. To do that, it needs to be aware of some non-trivial properties of Unicode text. In this article, I'll outline the solutions I came up with.

Burak Kanber[^]:

It’s damn hard to make robots walk on two legs. Hand-coding a walking routine will almost certainly fail. Even if you succeed in making a robot walk, the next robot that comes off the line might have a slightly different center of balance, and that algorithm you slaved over no longer works. Instead of enduring the inevitable heartbreak, you might use a GA to “teach the robot to learn to walk” rather than simply “teaching the robot to walk”.

Windows 8 app developer blog[^]:

In this post, we provide some tips and techniques on automating the testing of Windows 8 apps. Keep in mind that automated testing is a powerful technique and it requires some initial investment to reap the full rewards. The advice and examples in this post are meant to get you started, but you’ll need to build and maintain your own infrastructure on top of them.

Git-Process[^]:

This provides an easy way to work with a sane git workflow process that encourages using highly-focussed branches to encourage collaboration, enable fearless changes, and improve team communication.

Technicat[^]:

As a software engineer, you might want any number of things out of your job - a steady paycheck, the opportunity to work on interesting projects, a springboard to the next better job, or maybe you just like hanging out with other programmers. But by "effective", I mean the ability to complete projects in a timely manner with the expected quality. After working on dozens of software releases, I believe the following practices will bring you there, and while they may involve sticking your neck out, I'd like to think they will also advance your professional reputation, career longevity, and personal satisfaction.

Rather than truly teaching kids about computers, we’re teaching them to see the machines and programs as mysterious tools, offering little or no instruction about the conceptual aspects of computer science that lay the foundation for innovation and deeper study in the field

Bastard Programmer from Hell
if you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]