The Insider News

Jennifer Dewalt[^]:

What’s the best way to learn to code? After pondering this question for way too long, I decided to JFDI. But instead of just starting aimlessly, I decided to adhere to a simple and strict structure: Build a different website every day for 180 consecutive days. Every website must be accompanied by a blog post. Any code I write must be made publicly available on GitHub (open source) so that everyone can see it. It’s scary to have all of my mistakes and misunderstandings out in the open. The fact is, that if you want to learn to code you are going to make a lot of mistakes...

TechRadar[^]:

Electronic Arts' big push into mobile has paid off according to its recent financial results, with Apple revealed as its biggest games retailer.... Its cosy relationship with Apple was highlighted back in September when Real Racing 3 was used on stage at Apple's press conference to show off the iPhone 5's gaming skills. It seems that it was The Simpsons: Tapped Out that managed to bring in most of the money, however, with EA COO Peter Moore revealing in the earnings call that it had its highest revenue quarter since release and that the App Store was a big cash generator for the company.

Ars Technica[^]:

Google announced a new device, dubbed Chromecast.... The tiny dongle plugs into an HDMI input on a TV and connects to Wi-Fi, allowing users to stream video directly to their TVs from other devices—without requiring matching operating systems. Interfaces will now present a "cast" button that, when clicked, will send the video from a PC, tablet, or smartphone to the television. Playback can then be controlled by the device sending the video.

TechHive[^]:

Google's Wednesday announcement of Android 4.3 may not have carried the same amount of pizzaz as the company's Android 4.1 presentation in June 2012, but then again you can only fling your executives out of blimps so many times before it starts to get stale. Although the latest release of Google's mobile OS carries with it new features that are important to developers—like Bluetooth 4.0 Low Energy and OpenGL ES 3.0 support—it wouldn't be too inaccurate to say that this Android update is drab, dreary, and any other synonym of the word "boring" you want to throw in there.

Colossal[^]:

Meet Hal Lasko, mostly known as Grandpa, a 97-year-old man who uses Microsoft Paint from Windows ’95 to create artwork that has been described as “a collision of pointillism and 8-Bit art.”... Decades after his retirement his family introduced him to Microsoft Paint and he never looked back.

Techvibes.com[^]:

MasterCard and the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto are teaming up on September 28 and 29 to host the first MasterCard N>XT challenge. The two-day event will put teams of developers together to test their capability for creating a breakthrough payment solution. The contestants will have access to MasterCard’s open API, commerce infrastructure and tool kit.

Safari Books Online's Official Blog[^]:

JavaScript is everywhere: running applications in browsers, running the servers that feed HTML to the browser, and running database engines, to name a few. It should be no surprise, then, that JavaScript can also be used to control off-the-shelf hardware, circuits and other electronics like the Arduino platform. Through the use of frameworks like Rick Waldron’s Johnny-Five for NodeJS, and the “StandardFirmata” software package for Arduino, you can write JavaScript on your computer and use it to control and manipulate nearly any aspect of an Arduino-based hardware setup.

Dr Dobb's[^]:

After reading this post, you should be able to figure out what std::move does, although not necessarily how it does it.

Proper Fixation[^]:

Patrick McKenzie says 90% of the jobs involve things like implementing an internal travel expense reporting form, rather than a product shipped to external customers. He advises you to get used to the idea, even though such software is "soul-crushingly boring" as he puts it. How bad is it, and is it really 90% of the jobs?

Ayende @ Rahien[^]:

Tobi had a few questions about memory mapped files. And it is quite an interesting topic. A memory mapped file is a feature for all modern operating system. It require coordination between the memory manager and the I/O subsystem. Basically, you can tell the OS that some file is the backing store for a certain portion of the process memory. In order to understand that, we have to understand virtual memory....

ZDNet[^]:

James Larus, a 16-year Microsoft veteran and the man who started the Singularity operating system project at Microsoft, has left the company.... Singularity is a microkernel operating system and set of related tools and libraries that is developed completely in managed code. Singularity was not based on Windows; it was written from scratch as a proof-of-concept. Microsoft made the Singularity source code available for download under a non-commercial, academic license back in 2008.

AnandTech[^]:

In NVIDIA’s product hierarchy, the Quadro 6000 cards hold the position of NVIDIA’s most powerful products. They’re not just the flagship cards for the Quadro family, but really the flagship for the entire generation of GPUs, possessing the compute functionality of Tesla combined with the graphics functionality of GeForce/Quadro, and powered by what’s typically the single most powerful GPU configuration NVIDIA offers. They’re unabashedly high end – and have a price tag to match – but in many ways they’re the capstone of a generation.

Ars Technica[^]:

If you’d rather not deal with OEM overlays and carrier restrictions, you can plop down some cash and purchase unlocked, untainted Android hardware. But the OEM-tied handsets aren't all bad. Sometimes the manufacturer’s Android offerings tack on a little extra something to the device that stock or Nexus Android hardware might not. These perks include things like software improvements and hardware enhancements—sometimes even thoughtful little extra touches. We’ll take a look at four of the major manufacturer overlays available right now to compare how they stack up to stock Android.

TechHive[^]:

Not too long ago, the comics world seemed to view digital comics in the same way J. Jonah Jameson views Spider-Man: as a threat and a menace. In 2013, the world of comics has embraced and accepted digital, and at Comic-Con the discussion was more about how the comics medium should evolve and adapt to a world in which readers are experiencing comics on their phones and iPads rather than on paper.

Robot Square[^]:

The main difference between the NXT system (the Programmable brick, motors and sensors) and the EV3 system is the brick itself. The EV3 brick features a more powerful processor, 4 motor ports (instead of 3), a micro SD card slot, a USB host port and a Linux operating system. In addition, it has a slightly larger screen, more buttons, and it is possible to control the EV3 brick using both iOS and Android devices, as opposed to Android only for the NXT.

fogus[^]:

I’ve been programming for quite some time and have explored a variety of programming paradigms along the way. From time to time people will ask1 which is better: functional programming or object-oriented programming. Having done both extensively in my time I can exclaim a resounding: it depends.

Milano R net[^]:

Many people still save their data into Microsoft Excel files. This is an unhappy choice for many reasons but many was already written about this topic. Furthermore, unfortunately Excel become a de facto standard in many business environment and this routine seems to be difficult to strike out. Many solutions have been implemented to read Excel files from R: each one has advantages and disadvantages, so an universal solution is not available. Get an overview of all the solutions.

garysieling.com[^]:

“Natural Language Processing with Python”... has lots of motivating examples for natural language processing, focused on NLTK, which among other things, does a nice job of collecting NLP datasets and algorithms into one library. Let’s take one of Shakespeare’s sonnets and see if we can recommend alternate rhymes.

Regex Crossword[^]:

Regex Crossword is a game similar to sudoku or the traditional crossword puzzle, where you must guess the correct letters in the horizontal and vertical lines of a grid. In Regex Crossword you are not given a word to guess, but a pattern that tells you which letters are allowed.