The Insider News

Scott Hanselman[^]:

I'm totally geeked out about Smart Watches. I always have been, from the original Microsoft SPOT watch (from 10 years ago!) to the Pebble, and now the AGENT Smart Watch from Secret Labs. Secret Labs are the folks that brought us the Netduino open source electronics platform that uses the .NET Micro Framework. It's pretty awesome that you can write C# and run it in 64k or in 64gigs, from the wrist to the cloud.

Computerworld Blogs[^]:

Microsoft will release a test version of Windows 8.1 at its BUILD developers conference next week, but there's a chance that Windows update could go a long way towards hurting those developers, and slowing app growth in the Windows Store. Is there anything Microsoft can do to combat that? Reports say that among Windows 8.1's changes will be a boot-to-the-desktop option that allows people bypass the Start screen. Many users have been clamoring for it, because they find little use for the touch-oriented Start screen. That will certainly please users. But it may also hurt those, like many at the BUILD conference, who are writing so-called "Modern" apps for Windows 8.

Wouter's Wiki[^]:

Unlike other game making systems that focus on an engine/editor that happens to be able to call out to a scripting language, Lobster is a general purpose stand-alone programming language that comes with a built-in library suitable for making games and other graphical things. It is therefore not very suitable for non-programmers. It's also meant to be portable (mostly courtesy of OpenGL/SDL/Freetype), allowing your games to be run on Windows, Mac OS X, iOS, Linux, and Android (in that order of maturity, currently).

Carrot Creative[^]:

If you are a web developer, you’ve probably heard of nginx (pronounced engine-x). Nginx is a fast and extremely powerful http and reverse proxy server that can be used to quickly and easily serve webpages. Unfortunately, like many sysops tools, there is very little documentation and very few tutorials that explain how it works and how to get up and running.... After struggling with it myself for a bit, I finally got down the basics of how to work with nginx, and wanted to share it so that other developers would have an easier time picking it up.

Clemens Vasters[^]:

We're talking a lot about "Mobile" solutions in the industry, but the umbrella that this moniker casts has become far too big to be useful and doesn't represent any particular scenario subset that's useful for planning services for "mobile" devices. Nearly every personal computing scenario that consumers encounter today is "mobile". This post is a personal perspective on "mobile" applications and how applications that run on devices labeled under this umbrella really enable a range of very different scenarios, and do require a different set of backend services, depending on the core scenario.

Search Engine Watch[^]:

Ever since the news hit about the NSA PRISM surveillance program in the United States, many people have become much more concerned about what exactly search engines are tracking about them. Although Google, Bing, and Yahoo have stringent privacy policies, there have been enough people worried that they have begun looking at alternative search engines, particularly so-called “private search engines.”

Forbes[^]:

For years, Microsoft has refused to offer financial rewards to researchers who tell the company about security flaws in its software, even as Google and Facebook have ratcheted up their so-called “bug bounty” programs. Now the software giant has suddenly changed its mind–and it’s even offering even bigger bounties in some cases than those competitors.

ZDNet[^]:

Under iOS, users have the option to specify their own passwords to secure their device when it is used as a personal hotspot. However, for convenience and security, Apple initially populates the password field with an automatically generated password. This ensures that even users who are not security conscious enough to change their password from the default will be protected from those attempting to access their phone with a default password. However, according to three researchers from the German university, the method in which these passwords are generated leaves them vulnerable to attack.

The Gameological Society[^]:

Today, the Pippin is a curious footnote in Apple’s corporate history, a device long since laid to rest alongside the TurboGrafx-16 and the Sega Dreamcast; dug up and enjoyed almost exclusively by a few masochistic hardware modders and eBay traders. And yet, Apple is now a leader in the video game industry, with players choosing from countless titles on the iPhone and iPad.... Apple’s rise to the top as a gaming giant, however, has hardly been quick or easy. In fact, the company’s first big foray into video games was a complete disaster.

Ars Technica[^]:

The 802.11ac certification program, announced today, covers equipment pushing 1.3Gbps of data by using three spatial streams of 433Mbps each. This is the speed that has been supported in chips and routers for more than a year. Vendors got an early start with 802.11ac because the standard has been stable for a while, even though certification hadn't begun. But the real-world limit is not 1.3Gbps. We saw recently that chipmaker Quantenna unveiled 802.11ac Wi-Fi chips that push 1.7Gbps of data by using four wireless streams instead of three.

Ray Wenderlich[^]:

When you write Objective-C code, it eventually turns into machine code – the raw 1s and 0s that the ARM CPU understands. In between Objective-C code and machine code, though, is the still human-readable assembly language. Understanding assembly gives you insight into your code for debugging and optimizing, helps you decipher the Objective-C runtime, and also satisfies that inner nerd curiosity.

Secure Mac Programming[^]:

We have this trope in programming that you should hate the code you wrote six months ago. This is a figurative way of saying that you should be constantly learning and assimilating new ideas, so that you can look at what you were doing earlier this year and have new ways of doing it. It would be more accurate, though less visceral, to say “you should be proud that the code you wrote six months ago was the best you could do with the knowledge you then had, and should be able to ways to improve upon it with the learning you’ve accomplished since then”.

Channel 9[^]:

This session provides an overview of several Sysinternals tools, including Process Monitor, Process Explorer, and Autoruns, focusing on the features useful for malware analysis and removal. These utilities enable deep inspection and control of processes, file system and registry activity, and autostart execution points. You will see demos for their malware-hunting capabilities through several real-world cases that used the tools to identify and clean malware, and conclude by performing a live analysis of a Stuxnet infection’s system impact.

DaedTech[^]:

You can offer too much code. By this I mean something subtly but critically different from “you can write too much code,” as when you are needlessly complicated or verbose. Offering too much code means that you’re giving users of the public interface of your classes too many options. Before my TDD days, this was something with which I constantly struggled.

Tomek's blog[^]:

Oh yeah, I hear you, I hear you. "My StringUtils class, has this toUppercase() method and I test this very method, right?" Well, not really. What you really test is the functionality that the StringUtils provides, and because this functionality is so trivial that it fits within one method, this makes you think that you test a method. But in reality you test a functionality.

The '60s at 50[^]:

Associating numbers with specific characters has proved necessary to allow automated telegraph printers (teleprinters) and then computers to represent text. The most widely used mapping between numbers and letters was that approved on June 17, 1963, by the American Standards Association. It is the American Standard Code for Information Interchange, better known as ASCII.

Math with Bad Drawings[^]:

Once at a picnic, I saw mathematicians crowding around the last game I would have expected: Tic-tac-toe. As you may have discovered yourself, tic-tac-toe is terminally dull. There’s no room for creativity or insight.... But the mathematicians at the picnic played a more sophisticated version...

Proper Fixation[^]:

Today, pretty much everyone has a CPU, a DSP and a GPU, buried somewhere in their PC, phone, car, etc. Most don't know or care that they bought any of these, but they did. Will everyone, at some future point, also buy an FPGA? The market size of FPGAs today is about 1% of the annual global semiconductor sales (~$3B vs ~$300B). Will FPGA eventually become a must-have, or will its volume remain relatively low?

Intel Developer Zone[^]:

By day, David Auld is an Offshore Installation Manager (OIM) in the oil and gas industry. But when the production platform is humming along without him, Auld indulges his hobby as a devout “petrol-head” (car enthusiast). He also finds time to feed a passion for programming, which led to him earning a 2012 BSC Honours Degree in Computing. Surprisingly, these three facets of the native Scotsman all converged when Auld won the Entertainment Category of the Intel App Innovation Contest.

Daemonic Dispatches[^]:

Thomas Ptacek tweeted yesterday that "If you're not learning crypto by coding attacks, you might not actually be learning crypto." Judging by the number of twitter "favourites" and "retweets" of this comment, it seems to have struck a chord; but with all respect to Thomas, I absolutely disagree. Not only is it possible to learn cryptography without writing a line of code, but coding attacks is entirely useless for learning about modern cryptography; the best route to learning modern cryptography is a study of mathematical proofs.

Dream.In.Code[^]:

I'm interested in people's current predictions on what will happen to the various languages over the next few years. Java has had a bad press in recent years but has a major new release. Is this a new lease of life, particularly with Android taking off so rapidly?

Kloud Blog[^]:

Many years ago, back in Uni, I saw 2 guys in a computer lab writing a whole programming assignment without running it even once. The program was of relatively decent size written in C and consequently there were hundreds of compilation errors. That’s so silly, I thought.... After graduation I used to be a C++ programmer. The syntax sometimes was quite tricky and you would often compile after every new line of code. Sometimes, you would dare to write a whole function, just to find 10 compilation errors. Since then the way I code has changed with help of modern IDE...

Channel 9[^]:

Ever wondered how the pro’s physically manage to make a module? Well ok, you can get a fancy pick and place machine or send off for someone to assemble your module, but you can do it by hand. It is not as hard as expected. As part of a .NET Gadgeteer hands on event at the Modern Jago in Shoreditch we were delighted to have Justin Wilson from Ingenuity Micro attend and show us how things are done (www.ingenuitymicro.com). He has designed and built an nice collection of .NET Gadgeteer modules and mainboards and expects to have them available shortly.

Haacked[^]:

Code review is a tricky business. Code is full of hidden mines that lay dormant while you test just to explode in a debris of stack trace at the most inopportune time – when its in the hands of your users. The many times I’ve run into such mines just reinforce how important it is to write code that is intention revealing and to make sure assumptions are documented via asserts. Such devious code is often the most innocuous looking code.

@jhooks[^]:

When I use the term “enterprise” to describe software, I typically mean “software that helps people get work done more efficiently.” In this sense, Angry Birds and your favorite Twitter client are not enterprise applications. A Twitter client that has additional features to facilitate and track a company’s social engagement, on the other hand, might fall into the enterprise category. An application that is used in a call center to track incoming support requests is definitely “enterprise”. A system that connects several “legacy” systems and presents employees with a unified interface and saves 1000s of man-years every month of application context switching? Enterprise.

Ludwig Wendzich[^]:

I remember how in University my photography class and I struggled to grasp exposure and how it worked. We had exercises where for hours on end we were asked to "play" with the settings and get a feel for what they do. I don't like getting a "feel" for something. I like knowing how it works.... The trick was learning what each of the vertices afforded and cost you. That was the key to our DSLR simulator.

TechRepublic[^]:

Haswell is Intel’s new family of processors targeted at the PC and server market. With Haswell Intel has designed a processor suited to new PC form factors – laptops no thicker than 25mm, PC/tablet hybrids, pure tablets and all-in-one PCs. In particular Intel has targeted the fourth generation chip at serving what it calls the ‘ultrabook’ market. Intel defines ultrabooks as mobile computers thinner than 25mm, with touchscreen and voice control as standard and possibly convertible into either a tablet or laptop.

CNET News[^]:

Microsoft researchers say they have come up with a novel approach to boost the accuracy of speech recognition and rev up the speed in which it's rendered by creating a computation model that mimics the way the brain works. By applying so-called deep neural networks to speech recognition, Microsoft researchers claim that users in the United States, composing a text message or searching via Bing with their voices, will see results twice as fast as they did with Microsoft's previous technology. And the researchers say accuracy has improved by 15 percent.