The Insider News

Medium[^]:

Before I start I want to say up front, yes I worked at Yammer which was acquired by Microsoft. However, I was considering a WP7 long before then. I've been an iOS user for a long time. I'd say for about five years. I have always been open to other mobile OSs but for one reason or another none have really appealed to me. That is, until WP7. I never made the switch though because I was worried it was buggy or I'd hate the lack of apps.

Monday Note[^]:

The Google driveless car is an extraordinary technical achievement.... Spectacular as it is, this public demonstration is merely the tip of the iceberg. For Google, the economics of self-driving cars lie in a vast web of data that will become a must to operate partially or fully self-driving vehicles on a massive scale. This network of data will require immense computational and storage capabilities. Consider the following needs in the context of Google’s current position in related fields.

RobMensching.com[^]:

When I worked at Microsoft I used to read about startups on tech blogs and such. The funny thing is I cannot remember reading about any startups' experiences as they were just getting started. Now that it is my turn, I thought I'd try to capture some of the more mundane details about starting a startup. Maybe some of you will find it interesting. I left Microsoft on the last day of 2012. I took two weeks to announce my departure and sketch out a possible future. By the third week of January, we were in full startup mode.

Scott Berkun[^]:

A debate is rising on whether the old platitude No UI is the best UI is good or bad. I’ll tell you who is right: no one. Debates like these fall into the same stupid trap academics have fallen into for centuries: Platonic ideals are an illusion. They’re fun to play with, but they’re useless when your hands are dirty trying to solve a real problem for a real person. The only sane replacement is The best UI is what’s best for the person and situation I’m designing for. That’s all. Who cares what’s best in the abstract?

GigaOm[^]:

When Google launched its EC2 rival, Google Compute Engine, last June, it set some high expectations. Sebastian Standil’s team at Scalr put the cloud infrastructure service through its paces — and were pleasantly surprised at what they found.

Obviously a Major Malfunction...[^]:

A little while ago I got involved in a project that needed some hardware security testing. It was a complex system that used just about every protocol under the sun, including RF. Now RF, like other 'invisible' transport mechanisms, always gets me interested because, in my experience, once data becomes invisible, something magical happens: they forget about security. Nobody can see what's going on, so we don't need to worry about it, right? Wrong. Time and time again I've seen this... MagStripes, InfraRed, RFID, Bluetooth, Magic Moon Beams. You name it, they'll send data over it insecurely.

Egor Homakov[^]:

Most of our OAuth hacks pwn the Provider and its users (only the most-common vulnerability pwns the Client's authentication). This makes me really curious what the hell is wrong with Facebook and why don't they care about their own Graph security and their own users. Why do they allow a flexible redirect_uri, opening an enormous attack surface (their own domain + client's app domain)? We simply play Find-Chain-Of-302-Redirects, Find-XSS-On-Client and Leak-Credentials-Then-Find-Leaking-Redirect_uri games. Don't they understand it is clearly their business to protect themselves from non ideal clients?

Channel 9[^]:

From our humble beginnings as a website built with alpha quality forum technologies that we stitched together with creative code and a lot of love, and our videos were made by a few dudes roaming the halls of Microsoft with a cheap camcorder – look at us now. Channel 9 streams live events to 100,000s of people around the world, we have a state of the art recording studio, we do C9 Live at events around the world bringing you directly into the conversation with Microsoft folks in real time.

TUAW[^]:

One of my favorite features of Dropbox is 'versioning,' which keeps a copy of every change that you make. Every time you press 'save' on a document that's in your Dropbox, a new version is saved. There are two things I have been wondering about versioning: What happens to changes that you make while offline? What happens to changes when the file is renamed or overwritten? I finally did some quick tests of this, and the answers are pretty straight-forward...

TechRadar[^]:

Online gaming platforms and web forums have used avatars for years, and graphical representations of humans are hardly new, but the wider concept of the avatar is finally waking up. By morphing into life-size, artificially intelligent and customisable platforms, personal and even corporate avatars could soon replace receptionists, sales clerks and even replicate your colleagues in both real and virtual environments. And the avatar revolution has already started on your smartphone.

HTML5 Rocks[^]:

For close to thirty years, desktop computing experiences have centered around a keyboard and a mouse or trackpad as our main user input devices. Over the last decade, however, smartphones and tablets have brought a new interaction paradigm: touch. With the introduction of touch-enabled Windows 8 machines, and now with the release of the awesome touch-enabled Chromebook Pixel, touch is now becoming part of the expected desktop experience. One of the biggest challenges is building experiences that work not only on touch devices and mouse devices, but also on these devices where the user will use both input methods - sometimes simultaneously!

inessential.com[^]:

Even if you don’t use an RSS reader, you still use RSS. If you subscribe to any podcasts, you use RSS. Flipboard and Twitter are RSS readers, even if it’s not obvious and they do other things besides. Lots of apps on the various app stores use RSS in at least some way. They just don’t tell you — because why should they? ... One way or another, directly or indirectly, you use RSS. Without RSS all we’d have is pictures of cats and breakfast.

Quote:

RSS is built so deeply into the bones of so many websites and web services that we take it for granted.

Hardware Startup[^]:

If you are like me and build projects with Arduino, you must have felt the frustration with ripping your project apart, because you wanted to build something else with that Arduino. I have had the same issue many times, so I decided to find a way to solve this once and for all. Hence, how to build an Arduino clone for less than 5$.

Computerworld[^]:

Need to reformat data for use in another application? Plot it on a map? Use it for an interactive Web graphic? These open-source JavaScript libraries can help turn your data into a suitable format for analysis or a compelling online presentation.

Coding Journal[^]:

So why are there so few Windows 8 apps? I will tell you my (and only my) opinion and experience. I developed a few Windows 8 apps, some of them fairly complex. I tried to develop a few really great apps but many of those projects never got done. The reason is the API (WinRT). Let’s start with something (that should be) trivial. Imagine you want to display HTML files with images, CSS, JS in a WebView.... It can be done on Android, iOS and even on Windows Phone by copying the data to isolated storage and pointing the WebView there. This scenario is impossible in WinRT.