The Insider News

Exploring Local[^]:

Perhaps the most egregious error is that Apple’s team relied on quality control by algorithm and not a process partially vetted by informed human analysis. You cannot read about the errors in Apple Maps without realizing that these maps were being visually examined and used for the first time by Apple’s customers and not by Apple’s QC teams. If Apple thought that the results were going to be any different than they are, I would be surprised. Of course, hubris is a powerful emotion.

ROSEdu Techblog[^]:

This guide is designed to explain why you need to hide information and how can you do this when you do not trust the channel through which messages are conveyed. We will discuss about cryptographic system, encryption, decryption, one-way function, asymmetric keys and more. You may think of cryptography as the thing that keeps you untouchable inside of a soap bubble travelling by air around the world.

Jacques Mattheij[^]:

In 2002 or so a company called Acacia contacted our Toronto offices to discuss a license deal so that they wouldn’t have to sue us for violation of their patent filed in 1992 detailing digital video transmission over telephone lines. I don’t think I’ve ever been as angry as on that particular day. After regaining my normal sunny composure I went through the patent, read all the claims and realized they didn’t have a leg to stand on. In fact, I thought that their patent was a typical case of one that should have never been awarded in the first place. I most definitely wasn’t aware of the patent until they contacted me and I had a pretty good log of the way the original program was developed, complete with date-and-timestamps.

ShellJS[^]:

ShellJS is a portable (Windows included) implementation of Unix shell commands on top of the Node.js API. You can use it to eliminate your shell script's dependency on Unix while still keeping its familiar and powerful commands. You can also install it globally so you can run it from outside Node projects - say goodbye to those gnarly Bash scripts!

Hanselminutes Technology Podcast[^]:

Scott talks to Mark Powell, Senior Software Engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Mark has worked on three Mars lander missions, most recently supporting Curiosity. Mark lives on Mars Time. What's it like to write software that helps us talk to robots on that are on FREAKING MARS?

Grantland[^]:

Gadgetry of any sort has a rocky history in chess. In the late 18th century, for example, a Hungarian engineer named Wolfgang von Kempelen toured Europe with a machine called The Turk, which he promoted as a mechanical chess master. Legend holds that Napoleon and Ben Franklin are among the chess aficionados who lost to Kempelen's brainchild. Decades after those big wins, word got out that The Turk, which Kempelen built to woo Empress Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina of Austria, was a royal scam: For all its pulleys and wheels, Kempelen always made sure an accomplished and totally human chess player was hiding inside the machine, making all the right moves.

NYTimes.com[^]:

A yearlong examination by The New York Times has revealed that this foundation of the information industry is sharply at odds with its image of sleek efficiency and environmental friendliness. Most data centers, by design, consume vast amounts of energy in an incongruously wasteful manner, interviews and documents show. Online companies typically run their facilities at maximum capacity around the clock, whatever the demand. As a result, data centers can waste 90 percent or more of the electricity they pull off the grid, The Times found.

Living in an Ivory Basement[^]:

'"It's the interaction between fundamental science and applied science, and the interface between many disciplines, that creates new ideas," explains Herwig Kogelnik, the laser scientist. This may indeed have been Kelly's greatest insight.' Now, I know I'm a bit of an idealist, but to me this sounds like the way I and other scientists are using the Internet. I post ideas, they post ideas, and we interact on those ideas. I think things like arXiv and blogs like Haldane's Sieve are moving it in the right direction: free exchange of often rather deep scientific ideas.

Wired.com[^]:

Super Hexagon, released in August, is the latest iOS obsession among those seeking a killer challenge. It’s a hyper-speed, techno-soaked action game in which players dodge an endless succession of collapsing walls in a vertiginous never-ending tunnel. It’s extremely difficult, like Cavanagh’s last game VVVVVV. But that hasn’t kept it out of the top paid apps charts. Cavanagh isn’t only the creator of Super Hexagon; he’s also its best player. His scores are at the top of the leaderboards in most every game mode.

wpcentral[^]:

Up until now, the price of the ThinkPad Tablet 2 was only rumored to be between $600 and $700, making this on the higher end of that spectrum. The good news is that does include the full keyboard and the full Office 2013 suite, but we're not too sure about the optional dock, which has an Ethernet port, three USB ports and HDMI out.

Among the thousands of people expected to wait for hours outside of Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s stores today for the new iPhone, at least a couple hundred of them will be paid just to stand there.

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

Doug Finke[^]:

JSON (JavaScript Serialized Object Notation) has become one of the standard formats for sending data by HTTP request between web browsers and other applications. Here's how you can easily convert a JSON string to a PowerShell object.

LittleSmallscript[^]:

Hidden behind the huge Smalltalk Environment, Smalltalk always had a beautiful syntax that is fit for object oriented scripting. Little Smallscript is an attempt to let Smalltalk see the light of day again.

Two Ideas[^]:

The existence of Unix Beards is exceptionally well-documented, from Dilbert to Fortune, with a notable appearance in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. But even the author of In the Beginning was the Command Line doesn't seem to note that the Unix beard is really an extension of the philosopher's beard, and the academic's beard.

MessageAnalyzer[^]:

Microsoft Message Analyzer has been released to the public. As you might guess from the name, Message Analyzer is much more than a network sniffer or packet tracing tool. Here's what it can do...

Cuddletech[^]:

Up until about 30 days ago my primary workstation ran some variety of Solaris for nearly 10 years, starting with Solaris 9 when X86 became viable on X86, then OpenSolaris and the various Solaris Express releases and finally Solaris 11 Beta. It was one month ago today that I finally re-installed it with Ubuntu, returning me to Linux officially. Times are a’ changin’… so I thought I’d share the tale of my long experience and the events that brought me back to Linux on the desktop.

AllThingsD[^]:

With last Wednesday’s Apple iPhone 5 unveiling, and the recent Nokia Lumia launch, mobile is on top of the media agenda. But as the screen size and connector stories die down, the question of “when will my mobile phone become my wallet?” rises up once again. I’ve read at least a dozen stories about the NFC-less iPhone 5 in the past few days, and my question remains, who cares?

louisgray.com[^]:

First they came for our floppy drives. Then, they came for our CDs and our DVD drives. It won't be too long until the concept of a hard drive, or any local storage, beyond that needed for temporary offline use, is itself antiquated. After decades of dramatically increasing PC hard disks, from megabytes to terabytes, saving local data is more likely to put you at risk of loss, relative to remote backup, than it is to keep your data safe, helped along by many trends pushing toward cloud storage and applications.