The Insider News

Informal Protocol[^]:

There’s an important distinction here, and that’s separating files as UI from files as API. iOS (and, to a lesser but growing extent, Mac OS) has proven the value that users should not have to manage their own file system, that files as UI is a poorer user experience. You shouldn’t have to worry about where photos are stored in your photo library; iPhoto will manage collections of photos for you and they get stored on your disk somewhere.... This is a good thing, it’s a significant advancement forward in human/computer interaction design, and it’s the model that computing on all platforms will be following going forward. Files as API, however, are as important as ever. Besides being organizational chaos for a user to manage, a file system can be thought of as a structured way of mapping lots of pieces of separate data to a physical disk.

Hack a Day[^]:

Fran went all-out with her reverse engineering of the Apollo Saturn V LVDC board. Regular readers will remember that she was showing of the relic early this year when she took the board to her Dentist’s office to X-ray the circuit design. Since then she’s been hard at work trying to figure out how the thing functions using that look inside the board and components. When we say ‘hard at work’ we really mean it. Not only did she explore many different theories that resulted in dead ends, she also built her own version of the circuits to make sure they performed as she theorized.

Kalzumeus Software[^]:

If there was one course I could add to every engineering education, it wouldn’t involve compilers or gates or time complexity. It would be Realities Of Your Industry 101, because we don’t teach them and this results in lots of unnecessary pain and suffering. This post aspires to be README.txt for your career as a young engineer. The goal is to make you happy, by filling in the gaps in your education regarding how the “real world” actually works. It took me about ten years and a lot of suffering to figure out some of this, starting from “fairly bright engineer with low self-confidence and zero practical knowledge of business.” I wouldn’t trust this as the definitive guide, but hopefully it will provide value over what your college Career Center isn’t telling you.

Life in This World[^]:

The designers of Go agree with the collective experience of the last twenty years of programming that there are three basic data types a modern language needs to provide as built-ins: Unicode strings, variable length arrays (called “slices” in Go), and hash tables (called “maps”). Languages that don’t provide those types at a syntax level cannot be called modern anymore. (And what’s up with all the languages that claim all you need are linked lists? I’m sorry, this is not 1958, and you are not John McCarthy.) Go strings are UTF-8 because Go was designed by the guys who invented UTF-8, so why not?

Sergi Mansilla[^]:

I hear some of you, already. Just when you were over with that mess that it is to manipulate the DOM and that sneaky JavaScript language. Just when you learned to love the highly architected Android classes and managers or iOS’s beautiful method naming, why would we be back to that mayhem that is writing web applications? Didn’t we agree that HTML was not, after all, good enough for making real and performing apps?

ongoing by Tim Bray[^]:

Whether you like XML or not, we’re stuck with it for a long time. These days, the only new XML-based projects being started up are document-centric and publishing-oriented. Thank goodness, because that’s a much better fit than all the WS-* and Java EE config puke and so on that has given those three letters a bad name among so many programmers. XML for your document database is actually pretty hard to improve on.