The Insider News

Tommi Kaikkonen[^]:

Have a blog? With small adjustments, you can noticeably improve its typography. Your readers will thank you for it. This guide will help you understand the typographic foundations that will improve the readability of your articles.

Promit's Ventspace[^]:

I don’t feel that the way DirectX has been handled in recent years has been a positive thing. A number of technical decisions were made that were unfortunate, and then a number of business and marketing type decisions were made that compounded the problem. Many of the technologies (DirectInput, DirectSound, DirectShow) have splayed into a mess of intersecting fragments intended to replace them. The amount of developer support for Direct3D from Microsoft has been unsatisfactory, and anecdotal reports of internal team status have not been promising. Somebody told me a year or two back that the HLSL compiler team was one person. That’s not something you want to hear, true or not. Worst of all, though, was the communication. That’s the part that bugs me.

absorptions[^]:

If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember that it made a peculiar sound. But despite becoming so familiar, it remained a mystery for most of us. What do these sounds mean? As many already know, what you're hearing is often called a handshake, the start of a telephone conversation between two modems. The modems are trying to find a common language and determine the weaknesses of the telephone channel originally meant for human speech. Below is a spectrogram of the handshake audio.

jeremymorgan.com[^]:

So I found yet another cool use for a Raspberry Pi. You can actually use it as a file server, or more accurately a controller for a file server. All you need is your Pi and a nice external drive and you can serve files to anyone on your network. It’s pretty easy, I’ll show you how. You need the Raspberry Pi set up and connected to your network. You’ll also need an external drive. I’m using a Western Digital My Book 500 GB drive.

W3Techs[^]:

PNG is now the most popular lossless image compression format on the web. Only the lossy JPEG, which is the most appropriate format for photographs, is used on more sites. While GIF's patent issues mentioned above are long resolved, it's the technical superiority that now convinces webmasters to chose PNG over GIF.

Ars Technica[^]:

If you've been paying attention, you'll know that BlackBerry (née RIM) unveiled its long-awaited BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 handsets today alongside the BlackBerry 10 operating system. Our full reviews of both the Z10 (which we were given as we left the press event) and the BlackBerry 10 OS themselves will be here in the next few days, but in the meantime we have one question: just how fast are these phones?

NYTimes.com[^]:

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network.... The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

For me personally, the term "TFS" has historically meant "big scary corporate centralized source control" while Git has meant "small scrappy lightweight distributed source control." TFS meant connected (ZOMG, I can't code on a plane!) and Git meant occasionally connected (ZOMG, I don't know what rebase means!). However, I learned that Team Foundation Server (TFS) isn't just source control, it's a whole bug tracking, change management, application lifecycle management (ALM) suite. Source control is one pluggable piece. On the other hand, Git isn't just source control either. Git has become effectively FTP for code.

The ryg blog[^]:

If you’re curious, the actual information content of this post will be as follows: C string handling functions kinda suck. So does C++’s std::string. Dealing with wide character strings using only standard C/C++ functionality is absolutely horrible. And VC++’s implementation of said functionality is a damn minefield. That’s it. You will not actually learn anything more from reading this post. Continue at your own risk.

The PA Report[^]:

One of the largest battles in EVE Online history took place due to an accidental click, according to reports. The full details of why and how so many ships ended up battling each other is a fascinating read, but my question is what happens to the servers when something this crazy happens in the game. CCP, the creator of EVE Online, has detailed plans in place specifically for this sort of event.

Troy Hunt[^]:

As sure as night turns into day, sooner or later your PC will descend into an unrecoverable abyss where it no longer boots, stays booted or can’t even get booted to begin with.... Particularly for folks like me involved in building software, getting from zero to where you were when everything went wrong is a very high friction exercise. I reckon it’s the better part of a day’s effort to reinstall, reconfigure and restore files and you’ll still be finding missing things a month later.

Brian Harry[^]:

Both client and server are standard implementations of Git. Our client will work with pretty much any Git repository – local, enterprise, Codeplex, GitHub, BitBucket, …. And TFS will work with pretty much any Git client – existing Git command lines, XCode, Eclipse’s Git support, …. This was a core principle from day 1. This is not about lock in – it’s about providing a good and interoperable Git capability.

if(you.transferItem(me, ITEMS.hamburger, Date.now())).then(
  function() {
    me.transferItem(you, ITEMS.cash, new Date.nextTuesday());
  }
);

Smashing Coding[^]:

In the construction industry, a “firewall” is a specially-built wall designed to stop a fire from spreading between sections of a building... and in the late 1980s it made its way into computing. On one side of the wall is the seething electronic chaos of the Internet. On the other side is your powerful but vulnerable Web server. These computer firewalls are actually more like fire doors because they have to let some stuff through. They monitor all the electronic traffic coming in and out of a network. They follow a strict set of rules to determine what is allowed and what is blocked. This article explains in more detail how they work, the different types of firewalls available, what they are good at and not so good at, and how to configure them to protect a typical Web server.

Ars Technica[^]:

Luckily, the state of Internet security has... gotten better—in this article, the first in a five-part series covering online security, we're going to talk a bit about keeping yourself (and your business) safe on the Web. Even if you know what lurks in the dark corners of the Internet, chances are you someone you know doesn't. So consider this guide and its follow-ups as a handy crash course for those unschooled in the nuances of online security. Security aficionados should check out later entries in the series for more advanced information.