The Insider News

A List Apart[^]:

Improving performance is a constant process. First we ditched tables, spacer gifs, and inline markup such as the element in favor of CSS, reducing page sizes, and separating style from layout. Then we became aware of all our DNS requests, caching, and the total number of files and started using CSS sprites, moving many small images out of the HTML and into a single background image. Now it’s time we embrace the third epoch in performance optimization: symbol fonts.

browserdiet.com[^]:

And what if we got together a bunch of experts who work on large sites to create a definitive front-end performance guide? And not just one of those boring guides made for robots, what if we did something fun? The definitive front-end performance guide...

Kinect for Windows Developer Blog[^]:

We are happy to announce we are releasing the Kinect for Windows samples under an open source license. You can find everything on CodePlex. We have posted a total of 22 unique samples in C#, C++, and Visual Basic. We’re doing this for a few reasons...

The Register[^]:

Here's the programme. I am going to put TextPad and Sublime through Verity's Immutable, Scientific And Absolutely Perfectly Fair Six Point Programmers' Editor Test, and see who wins. I am aware I am treading on sensitive and subjective ground here, so I am going to apply legendary Microsoft blogger Raymond Chen's anti-nitpicking strategy. I will attempt to anticipate and dismiss in advance every possible commentard objection, and leave the right-thinking reader with an impression of calm, reasoned rationality, and definitely not obsessive paranoia.

devo.ps[^]:

Back when our team was dealing with operations, optimization and scalability... we had our fair share of troubleshooting poorly performing applications and infrastructures of various sizes, often large (think CNN or the World Bank). Tight deadlines, “exotic” technical stacks and lack of information usually made for memorable experiences. The cause of the issues was rarely obvious: here are a few things we usually got started with.

Hack a Day[^]:

The book is a great read on practical applications of hardware hacking. It starts off with simple hacks: installing a blue LED, building a USB adapter for the device’s controller ports, and replacing the power supply. The rest of the book goes over how the security on the device was compromised, and the legal implications of pulling off the hack.

CITEworld[^]:

It was snowing when we arrived at the BlackBerry campus in Waterloo, on a bitterly cold winter day. There were icicles under the bus, and the bare trees and snow-covered fields turned Canada black and white. We were visiting BlackBerry’s home ground to hear the story behind BlackBerry 10, the company’s new operating system and the engine it hopes to power a dramatic turnaround. Two years of work had just ended, and the company was ready to talk about what it had done, how it had done it, and where it wanted to go.

ZDNet[^]:

In a surprise reversal, Microsoft has changed the default behavior of Flash content on websites viewed using Internet Explorer in Windows 8 or Windows RT. Previously, sites had to be on a whitelist before Flash would work. The new behavior effectively turns the Compatibility View list into an exclusive blacklist of badly behaved sites.

The Verge[^]:

Microsoft made a bold bet to build its own hardware, competing directly with Apple's iPad, but it was never an easy task to create something new and unique. Microsoft's own tablet is the result of it facing a "big challenge" relying on its hardware partners to create a high quality physical device that could go up against Apple. Project "Georgetown," the codename for Surface RT, started with two simple goals: the tablet couldn't leak and it must ship when Windows 8 is ready.... After months and months of prototyping and tweaking, the end result was unveiled to the world on June 18th of last year. These are a few of the concepts and prototypes that led to that final product.

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Almost three years after Google released its WebM video encoding technology as a "free" and open alternative to the existing H.264 backed by Apple and others, it has admitted its position was wrong and that it would pay to license the patents WebM infringes.

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Like the Republican Party, Microsoft’s leadership team never got the message that the landscape was rapidly changing to its disadvantage. The company’s fixation on the declining Windows platform reminds me of the Republican Party’s continuing focus on 18th-Century social values where no Internet existed, long-distance travel was done via horse and carriage, and Social Security and Medicare were not heard of.

Peter Ritchie's MVP Blog[^]:

There’s a plethora of IoC containers for .NET. They’re all great tools, like StructureMap, Autofac, Ninject, Unity, etc. Don’t get me wrong, they’re powerful and they do a lot of things. But, they do a lot of things. What do I mean by “they do a lot of things”? Well, they’re all effectively designed to work with codebases that are not DI-friendly. They go out of their way to provide features to support DI in any imaginable design. “What’s wrong with that” you say? If you’ve got a brownfield project, that’s great—you can likely get testability with code not designed to be testable—which is a good thing. But, these abilities make us lazy.