The Insider News

A Neighborhood of Infinity[^]:

Being compatible with Heisenberg uncertainty isn't enough for something to be realisable as a physical state. Is there a wavefunction that allows us to know the digits to the right of the decimal point as far as we want for both position and momentum measurements? Maybe surprisingly, the worlds of audio and graphics can help us answer this question.

Pythonic Perambulations[^]:

I [was] passing the time by poking around on the imgur gallery, and saw a couple animated gifs based on one of my all-time favorite games, Super Mario Bros. It got me wondering: could I use matplotlib’s animation tools to create these sorts of gifs in Python? Over a few beers at an SFO bar, I started to try to figure it out. To spoil the punchline a bit, I managed to do it... This animation was created entirely in Python and matplotlib, by scraping the image data directly from the Super Mario Bros. ROM. Below I’ll explain how I managed to do it.

Atomic Spin[^]:

After I got over how cool it was that this technique was going to be useful, I got uncomfortable. “There’s a giant space of programs that this computer can emit and consume that I have no way of ever understanding,” I thought. That’s cool, but it’s also scary. I made something that caused me to feel deeply insignificant. Programming became scary. The potential of the machine suddenly felt limitless.

Clef[^]:

Usernames and passwords are the de facto standard for accessing user accounts on the web, so it’s likely that if your users have accounts, that’s the way you have them sign in. Keeping up with best practices for handling passwords can be hard, but is important for your users safety. Here’s a quick list of the things you should be doing to secure your passwords today.

Internet Archive[^]:

Books related to the Atari line of computers, including the Atari 400, 800, ST, XL and XE. Titles include: Atari Calculator Manual, Your Atari Computer, Your Atari Computer XL Edition, Your Atari Comes Alive and Users Handbook to the Atari.

Lifehacker[^]:

We feature a lot of different DIY electronics projects on Lifehacker, but the barrier for entry might seem high at a glance. However, it's not nearly as difficult as it looks. Here's how to get started.

Bill Reiss' Development Blog[^]:

So back to my original frustration about Windows Phone and having a default non-WebKit browser. This is a real issue and I feel now that I recommended the wrong solution. The better solution is to add the capability to Windows Phone 8 to choose an alternative default browser. This would leave it open to the browser providers such as Google, Mozilla, Opera, etc. to provide a better option on the platform. Specifying a different default browser is something you can’t do on the iPhone, and Windows Phone could easily turn it into some positive publicity. After all, Windows 8 lets you pick your default browser, so why not enable this in Windows Phone.

DZone[^]:

Typography is one of the important aspect of the web designing . The User Interface / UX (User Experience) design is one of the challenging work in the design and development of the website. In this blog post , we will explore some of the Typography tools which will be useful for the Web Designers.

Ars Technica[^]:

Researchers have uncovered an ongoing, large-scale computer espionage network that's targeting hundreds of diplomatic, governmental, and scientific organizations in at least 39 countries, including the Russian Federation, Iran, and the United States. Operation Red October, as researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab have dubbed the highly coordinated campaign, has been active since 2007, raising the possibility it has already siphoned up hundreds of terabytes of sensitive information. It uses more than 1,000 distinct modules that have never been seen before to customize attack profiles for each victim.

Dream.In.Code[^]:

I came across this article discussing why PHP has a bad reputation. A lot of it came down to developers using poor practices. This excerpt: "Copying internet tutorial code and not reviewing it" struck me as particularly relevant, and something I think we see a lot of in the PHP forum. Granted for any language there are the low-quality and outdated tutorials out there, but PHP seems to have an abundance of this.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

A few months ago while sitting at a Burger King (yes, I know) I recorded a video on "How to use Windows 8 in 3 minutes" and threw it up on YouTube. It's been viewed nearly a half million times. Eek. It's got poor audio, and it's WAY too fast. I did it on a goof. However, people keep showing it to family and friends.... So tonight I took a few hours and did a new video that I'm VERY happy with and I hope you enjoy it. It's clean, clear, and only 25 minutes long and it explains, I believe, Windows 8 and its changes for anyone with basic Windows experience.

Ken Shirriff's blog[^]:

By focusing on a simple circuit, the 6502 microprocessor chip can actually be understood at the silicon level. It's interesting to see how the complex patterns etched on the chip can be mapped onto gates, and their function understood.... In this article, I show how overflow is computed in the 6502 microprocessor at the transistor and silicon level. I've discussed the mathematics of the 6502 overflow flag earlier and thought it would be interesting to look at the actual chip-level implementation. Even though the overflow flag is a slightly obscure feature, its circuit is simple enough that it can be explained at the silicon level.

programming is terrible[^]:

Dijkstra is an emminently quotable computer scientst, mostly for his famous lists of uncomfortable truths. Oft repeated is his rallying call against BASIC, most of the time without context: "It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."... The thing people forget is that programming was substantially different in 1975. Dijkstra railed against Dartmouth Basic — a glorified assembler language. It isn’t the BASIC used today.