The Insider News

YouTube[^]:

This is a short video about Erlang, the functional programming language.

ZDNet[^]:

One of Microsoft's goals with Windows 8, sources have said all along, was to try to convince the developer community that it is/was still worth writing "killer apps" for Windows. But if Blue, a k a Windows 8.1, allows users to opt to boot straight to the Desktop and avoid the Metro Start Screen as much as possible, doesn't this undermine the message that Metro is the future? What's the reason Windows devs should bother putting their eggs in the Windows 8/WinRT -- rather than the tried-and-true Win32 basket?

Wired.com[^]:

Genes contain information that defines the way our cells function, and some parts of the genome express themselves in much the same way across different types of cells and organisms. This would allow Endy and his team to build a language scientists could use to carefully engineer gene expression – what they call “the layer between the genome and all the dynamic processes of life.”

Troy Hunt[^]:

You know how security people get all uppity about SSL this and SSL that? Stuff like posting creds over HTTPS isn’t enough, you have to load login forms over HTTPS as well and then you can’t send auth cookies over HTTP because they’ll get sniffed and sessions hijacked and so on and so forth. This is all pretty much security people rhetoric designed to instil fear but without a whole lot of practical basis, right? That’s an easy assumption to make because it’s hard to observe the risk of insufficient transport layer protection being exploited, at least compared to something like XSS or SQL injection. But it turns out that exploiting unprotected network traffic can actually be extremely simple, you just need to have the right gear.

profserious[^]:

I offer these but you may wish to add your own pieces of really bad advice...

Minifesto.org[^]:

Fight for Pareto's law, look for the 20% of effort that will give you the 80% of results....

AllThingsD[^]:

The first rule of building on top of another company’s platform: Make sure you play by the rules.
The latest case in point: Ribbon, a Twitter-based payments startup, launched a new product on Wednesday morning, and it looked pretty cool. The main draw was the ability to buy stuff from inside a tweet, simply by clicking on a button and entering your credit card info and shipping deets... long story short, Twitter shut off support to Ribbon’s new feature within a few hours after launch.

GeekWire[^]:

Duane Campbell is retiring from Microsoft today, after 28 years as a software developer with the company. Chances are you’ve never heard of him, even if you follow the company closely, and that’s one of the best parts of his story. Rather than following the traditional management and executive path that put some of his former peers into the spotlight, Campbell understood what he loved to do, and he had the courage to stick with it. He loves to code — and he does it extremely well.

Kent Beck[^]:

My intuition and experience is that long test names are good and short function names are good, all else being equal. But why? ... One constraint common to test naming and function naming is that the names should be chosen to optimize readability and comprehension. Your team will invest far more reading names than writing them. This doesn't mean that long names are necessarily good, but that the focus should be on the reader's experience, not the writer's.

CITEworld[^]:

Yesterday Microsoft reported flat Windows revenue from the year before, despite an unprecedented drop in PC sales.... There are several factors that made this possible. As investor relations chief Chris Suh put it on the earnings call, "Non-OEM revenue grew 40% this quarter, driven by sales of Surface and continued double digit growth in volume licensing." So how much did Surface help Microsoft's Windows revenue this quarter? Let's do a rough back-of-the-envelope estimate.

The Official Lookout Blog[^]:

Lookout has discovered BadNews, a new malware family, in 32 apps across four different developer accounts in Google Play. According to Google Play statistics, the combined affected applications have been downloaded between 2,000,000 – 9,000,000 times. We notified Google and they promptly removed all apps and suspended the associated developer accounts pending further investigation. All Lookout users are protected against this threat. BadNews masquerades as an innocent, if somewhat aggressive advertising network. This is one of the first times that we’ve seen a malicious distribution network clearly posing as an ad network.

Marco.org[^]:

No matter what you make or how much you charge, some people will find things to complain about. If you drop your app’s price all the way down to free, people will still complain — just not about the price. They’ll move on to the features, the implementation, the design, the updates, the way you look, or what kind of dog you have. They’ll complain about every facet of your app, and then they’ll complain about unrelated topics just to pile on.