The Insider News

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

Most of the criticism about Windows 8 is around how Microsoft attempted to bridge the gap between a modern touch-based, tablet-centric (if you will), UI and the traditional desktop. Now this is actually a complex situation, because we aren’t just talking about UI but also about a new app model. In theory you could have one without the other. In previous posts I’ve talked about why the overall re-imagination of Windows, including all these elements, was important. So as one thinks about various alternative scenarios you have to consider that not all of the modernization would have necessarily occurred.

IGN[^]:

It has been out for three days, and SimCity is broken. Seriously, unplayably broken. As a long-time fan who's been looking forward to this week for many years, this is a huge, frustrating disappointment. The worst part? The main issue isn't with the game itself, but an entirely unnecessary and completely avoidable always-online Digital Rights Management (DRM) system that's keeping millions of fans from playing the game they paid for, when they were told they'd be able to play it.

Quote: CNet[^]

If a tree fell in the forest, and no one noticed... the European Commission would impose a staggering fine -- and then congratulate itself for protecting consumers from falling trees. That's essentially what just happened: the Commission fined Microsoft $732 million for failing to show its "browser ballot" when users installed one of its Windows 7 updates.

Important Note on "SimCity"

Many customers are having issues connecting to the "SimCity" servers. EA is actively working to resolve these issues, but at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed. Please visit https://help.ea.com/en/simcity/simcity for more information.

Future<bool> writeFile(String data,
                       File file) {
 return file.open(FileMode.WRITE)
   .then((io) => io.writeString(data))
   .then((io) => io.close())
   .then((io) => true)
   .catchError((error) => false);
}

John Papa[^]:

I’m taking my own advice here and responding to some frequently asked questions I receive on SPA on my blog. I get some of these a lot and it just makes sense that I aggregate them and share for discussion. The questions are all good and they cover a variety of experiences. Hopefully by sharing them, they will be of benefit to others.

raywenderlich.com[^]:

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been in love with role-playing games. There’s something so magical about an epic storyline set in a vast, intricate world. But when it comes to actually programming a RPG, it’s easy to get intimidated by that same epic complexity! Well, there’s some good news. There are now some killer tools, frameworks and tutorials to make this a lot easier than it used to be.

wekeroad.com[^]:

I've been teeth-deep in Client-side Javascript frameworks over the last 4 months for Tekpub. This month is Angular, last month was Ember's turn and I gave up. It's the first time I've given up - here's why.... You Keep Telling Me It's MVC... Yes, the concept of MVC has been contorted over the past decade as web frameworks have adopted it and massaged it to their own ends. What does this mean?

LispCast[^]:

I was trained in Java at University. The OOP matrix was firmly implanted in my thinking. I wanted to share some things that I have learned from Clojure that were certainly possible in Java but never became fundamental to my programming practice. Clojure certainly has learned a lot from Java. It might be cool if the learning went both ways. These are universal principles. In fact, these principles are actually well known in the OOP world. You probably already know them, so learning Clojure is not required (but it is recommended!).

Braintree[^]:

Working in Go was tons of fun; the language designers have put a lot of work into making the language a joy to use. We particularly appreciated the first-class focus the language puts on the parts of development that are uninteresting in theory but very important in practice, such as third-party library management, coding convention enforcement, and testing. With that said, we ran into a series of gotchas, irritants, and warts while developing our application, which I’ll elaborate on below. Ultimately, these problems were severe enough that they convinced us that we couldn't justify the gains we saw from using Go...

Made of Bugs[^]:

At Stripe, we rely heavily on ruby and EventMachine to power various internal and external services. Over the last several months, we’ve known that one such service suffered from a gradual memory leak, that would cause its memory usage to gradually balloon from a normal ~50MB to multiple gigabytes. It was easy enough to work around the leak by adding monitoring and restarting the process whenever memory usage grew too large, but we were determined to track down the root cause. Our exploration is a tour through a number of different debugging tools and techniques, so I thought I would share it here.