The Insider News

Scripting News[^]:

Here's one of the fundamental rules of programming. You're at the end of your day, you've gotten a lot of stuff done, and you have one more thing to get right before the feature is complete, and you're searching for the answer, trying all kinds of ideas, thoroughly confused, not wanting to get up until it's done, just slogging away and not getting it.

Rey Bango[^]:

Any software maker will tell you the same thing; provide detailed steps and a test case if possible to make isolating your issue as easy as possible. If you simply type, “My site doesn’t render in IE9″, you’re making things more difficult. Take the time to really isolate the problem and provide detailed, concise information so that the IE team can properly determine if it’s a bug and even if there’s a workaround.

Paul Irish[^]:

For many of us developers, WebKit is a black box. We throw HTML, CSS, JS and a bunch of assets at it, and WebKit, somehow.. magically, gives us a webpage that looks and works well. But in fact, as my colleague Ilya Grigorik puts it... "WebKit isn’t a black box. It’s a white box. And not just that, but an open, white box." So let’s take a moment to understand some things.

Jesse Storimer's Blog[^]:

Over the year and some, since I've been publishing ebooks, various people have asked about my publishing tools. I've given a few responses via email, or links via Twitter, but never laid everything out in one place. In December of 2012 I published an update to one of my books, here I'll lay out the steps (and tools) involved in writing, editing, and distributing an update to my ebooks. Let's start with the writing.

infrageeks[^]:

The consequences are being played out in the market right now where it would appear that the traditional PC, desktop or notebook is a market that has peaked and is now starting its slow decline. Like any evolutionary platform change, this will not be immediate or quick and will play out over at least a decade. During this period I predict that the mass of computing will move to systems that are deemed good enough for most people, but that drive expert users crazy.

NYTimes.com[^]:

A 30-second video of a newborn baby shows the infant silently snoozing in its crib, his breathing barely perceptible. But when the video is run through an algorithm that can amplify both movement and color, the baby’s face blinks crimson with each tiny heartbeat. The amplification process is called Eulerian Video Magnification, and is the brainchild of a team of scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

MIT Technology Review[^]:

Friendster is a social network that was founded in 2002, a year before Myspace and two years before Facebook. Consequently, it is often thought of as the grand-daddy of social networks. At its peak, the network had well over 100 million users, many in south east Asia. In July 2009, following some technical problems and a redesign, the site experienced a catastrophic decline in traffic as users fled to other networks such as Facebook. Friendster, as social network, simply curled up and died.

Quote: Digital Trends[^]

Now that we can navigate a computer screen through gestures, could a three-dimensional interface that recognizes gestures be far behind? According to Jinha Lee, who created a 3D desktop when he interned at Microsoft’s Applied Sciences Group, the future could be closer than you think.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

I've been a 100% remote worker at Microsoft for just about 5 years now. My last two jobs were both 7 year long gigs, so this isn't the longest I've worked somewhere, but clocking in at a half-decade, it's the longest I've worked remotely. Given that I haven't yet been fired, it's fair to say that I'm a pretty good remote worker.

Free Pascal Answers[^]:

These are many new improvements of Object Pascal programming language in Free Pascal compiler. I don’t know how much new are they, but at least they are new since Delphi 7 language.

Mozilla Hacks[^]:

At first glance the Firefox Marketplace for Firefox OS may look similar to the Apple Store or Google Play Store but there is a key difference: it does not lock you into Mozilla or lock you into your Firefox OS phone. It enables you to sell a web app that will run on any open web device by way of the receipt protocol. Non-Mozilla marketplaces can participate in selling apps on Firefox OS out of the box by implementing the receipt format and users won’t notice anything different when running a paid app from either store.

Hack a Day[^]:

Your hands do a lot of work between the keyboard and the mouse, why the heck are you letting your feet be so lazy? Dossier van D. is putting an end to the podiatric sloth. He built this set of three foot pedals which have gone through two versions of functionality.

The David Walsh Blog[^]:

I recently learned a cool technique from Simurai about how to animate PNG sprites with the CSS3 animations' steps() property. The main idea in this technique is to "recreate" some kind of animated GIF but with the tiles of a PNG sprite. As with everyone I know, I played to Street Fighter in my childhood and when I saw this ... guess what popped in my head?

Building Windows 8[^]:

People want similar mobility on their PCs as they get on their smartphones. It is unlikely that your end goal is just to get connected to the Internet. Instead, connecting to the Internet is a step (or a hurdle) towards what you really want to do, like surf, socialize, or explore, and you would prefer that your PC is connected and ready for you to use whenever you want and wherever you are. We looked at the fundamentals of wireless connectivity and re-engineered Windows 8 for a mobile and wireless future, going beyond incremental improvements. This is a good example of work that requires new hardware to work in concert with new software in order to realize its full potential.

The Windows Club[^]:

Some malware cannot be removed from your computer easily, once they get past your anti-virus protection and integrate themselves deeply in your system – sometimes making it unbootable. In such a situation, it may be advisable to use Rescue CDs. A Rescue CD will help you recover your system by removing nasty threat that resist removal by regular antivirus software. These CDs perform a scan and removes computer virus without booting the computer system.