The Insider News

Philip Walton[^]:

The problem with z-index is that very few people understand how it really works. It's not complicated, but it if you've never taken the time to read its specification, there are almost certainly crucial aspects that you're completely unaware of. Don't believe me? Well, see if you can solve this problem...

RTigger.com[^]:

Almost every job description you see for a software developer has some sort of language qualifier. “Looking for an experienced C# developer”, “Software Engineer (Java)”, “PHP Guru Wanted”, “Ruby Developer”. This is wrong. If you want a good software developer, you shouldn’t care about the language they’ve used in the past. A good developer will be able to deliver value regardless of the language they’ve used before.

Nettuts+[^]:

2012 was an excellent year for the PHP community, thanks to many badly needed features being added to version 5.4, as well as the countless projects, advancing PHP to the next level. In this article, I’d like to review a handful of the issues that people had with PHP in the past, and provide a glimpse at why 2013 just may be the year of PHP!

asymco[^]:

As it did yesterday, on occasion Apple reports the cumulative total downloads and payments to developers. Since this is done in variable time intervals, it makes analysis of the value of the app store difficult. But not impossible.

TightWind[^]:

The phrase “wearable computing” bothered me... because it’s very limiting, and it doesn’t seem to capture what’s important about it. The defining characteristic is that they are computing devices which monitor and do things on their own for people, and there’s no reason that they have to be worn. They could be embedded in other objects, such as weight scales, exercise machines, bicycles and cars, and in many ways, this idea applies equally well to software as well.... I realized that a much better term for these devices is “unconscious computing.”

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

Crapware is in the news in a big way this week thanks to Oracle’s recent Java “security” update and a blog post by Long Zheng that exposes the economic incentives for software developers to bundle crapware installers. He also points out that respected Silicon Valley VCs are funding Crapware-installer InstallMonetizer.... One of the things coming out in all of this is that Microsoft, usually seen as one of the victims in the spread of crapware, is not completely innocent in this matter.

Web Dev .NET[^]:

You may have seen the buzz yesterday about the Critical Microsoft Security Hot-fix (MS13-008). The hot-fix applies to a security issue in Internet Explorer versions 6 through 8. Newer version of IE (9 and 10) are not in danger. You could apply the above hot-fix to your existing old version of Internet Explorer, but why? Why not go ahead and upgrade to IE9 or IE10? Not only will you get more features and a faster browser, but you will also be pushing the web forward.

Learning by Shipping[^]:

Moving beyond the gotcha blogs, there’s an actual reason for using technology products and services other than the ones you make (or happen to be made by the company where you work/ed). I think everyone knows that, even a thousand tweets later. The approach in many industries to downplay or even become hostile to the competition are well-documented and studied, and generally conclude that experiencing the competition is a good thing. Learning from the competition is not just required of all product development folks, but can also be somewhat of a skill worth honing. Let’s look at the ins and outs of using a competitive product.

Matt Might[^]:

Languages form the terrain of computing. Programming languages, protocol specifications, query languages, file formats, pattern languages, memory layouts, formal languages, config files, mark-up languages, formatting languages and meta-languages shape the way we compute. So, what shapes languages? Grammars do. Grammars are the language of languages. After reading this article, you will be able to identify and interpret all commonly used notation for grammars.

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.