The Insider News

The Agileer[^]:

There is a lot of advice out there on how to go about building your own custom exception classes. A lot of these sources are at least partially correct. Some are totally wrong. Some even advocate abandoning the base System.Exception class altogether, but that’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater, in my opinion. None that I've seen show how to serialize/deserialize your custom exception class should it have additional data in it's subclass. It’s enough to make one despair of ever finding the “right” way to build an exception class.

adit.io[^]:

Like Morpheus in the Matrix, fmap knows just what to do; you start with Nothing, and you end up with Nothing! fmap is zen. Now it makes sense why the Maybe data type exists.

leebrimelow.com[^]:

This post is not meant at all to be anti-jQuery. But if you are able to target modern browsers in your work, using the native C++ methods provided by your browser will not-surprisingly give you a tremendous performance boost in most areas. I think there are many developers who don’t realize that most of the jQuery methods they use have native equivalents that require the same or only a slighter larger amount of code to use. Below are a series of code samples showing some popular jQuery functions along with their native counterparts.

Evan Miller[^]:

Being able to apply statistics is like having a secret superpower. Where most people see averages, you see confidence intervals. When someone says “7 is greater than 5,” you declare that they're really the same. In a cacophony of noise, you hear a cry for help. Unfortunately, not enough programmers have this superpower. That's a shame, because the application of statistics can almost always enhance the display and interpretation of data.

KwartzLab Makerspace[^]:

I dumped the ROM of a Tamagotchi using the code execution ability I posted previously. I wrote 6502 code that dumped each byte of the memory space of the Tamagotchi, and output it over port A (which is usually the Tamagotchi button input) via SPI.... I started by dumping the entire memory space, from 0×0000 to 0xffff, which included all mapped memory, such as ROM, RAM and ports. This only dumped some of the ROM, though, as the GPLB52x microcontroller supports paging outside of 6502 paging. The first 16 kilobytes of the ROM are always mapped to 0xc000-0xffff, and then the rest of the ROM is split into 19 pages that can be mapped to 0×4000-0xbfff as needed. To dump the entire ROM, I needed to figure out how to page.

NativeX[^]:

We recently transitioned a large portion of our backend infrastructure from Microsoft SQL Server to Apache Cassandra. Today, this Cassandra cluster backs our mobile advertising network, supporting over 10 million daily active users that produce over 10,000 transactions per second, with an average database request latency of under 2 milliseconds! The journey to get there is one of struggle and perseverance, where everyone lives happily ever after.

Volatile and Decentralized[^]:

I just got back from HotOS 2013 and, frankly, it was a little depressing.... I could not help being left with the feeling that the operating systems community is somewhat stuck in a rut. It did not help that the first session was about how to make network and disk I/O faster, a topic that has been a recurring theme for as long as "systems" has existed as a field. HotOS is supposed to represent the "hot topics" in the area, but when we're still arguing about problems that are 25 years old, it starts to feel not-so-hot.

Linux Journal[^]:

Like many great consumer Linux products... manufacturers assume in nearly every case that your "other" computer will run Windows.... The good news is, with the installation or configuration of a few programs, it's pretty easy to get your Android device (all the steps in this article are equally applicable to phones and tablets unless stated otherwise) to play nice with your Linux boxen.