The Insider News

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.

Justin Dunham[^]:

Much of what I’ve heard when I hear about UX is: How do we arrange everything on the screen so that a user can figure it out and quickly accomplish their goals? How do we make use of graphic design, layout, text, interactivity, affordances, animation and so on to make things easier for the user? Lately I’ve start learning to build electronics with Arduino and it’s made me much more sympathetic to the designers of simple hardware.

ZDNet[^]:

Microsoft is reaching out to two main audiences this year at Build, said Steve Guggenheimer, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism Group: The existing Win32, line-of-business/commercial developer community and the startup community. "We need a good conversation with that community," said Guggenheimer about the existing .Net developer base, many of whom have felt disenfranchised by Microsoft's recent developer push toward HTML/JavaScript.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

Some days... some days it's frustrating to be on the web. We're compiling C++ into JavaScript and running Unreal in the browser but at the same time, here in 2013, we're still making the same mistakes. And by we, I mean, the set of web developers who aren't us, right Dear Reader? Because surely you're not doing any of these things. All of these are solvable problems. They aren't technically hard, or even technically interesting.

fabiensanglard.net[^]:

On Apr 17, 2012 Jordan Mechner released the source code of Prince of Persia. Even though it is the Apple II version written in 6502 assembly language, it was a pleasant experience to dive in the code of that mythical game: As usual there were many fascinating sofware wizardries to discover. The Apple II apparent poor environment for game programming was actually ground to unmatched innovation and creativity : From self-modifying code, in-house bootloader, clever floppy disc format to skewing lookup tables: Prince Of Persia features engineering treasures in every modules.

TidBITS[^]:

I see three main reasons why people might not be thinking about — or even doing! — backups as much any more: Time Machine, cloud services, and new bogeymen.... Needless to say, not paying attention to backups is a dangerous trend — despite Apple’s excellent work with automatic iOS backups to iCloud and Google’s cloud-focused Chrome OS, we’re still years from a mainstream computer operating system that will automatically and reliably back up all local data. (Of course, if the NSA is keeping copies of all our files, perhaps they could let us restore too!)

Adafruit Learning System[^]:

Feel like someone is snooping on you? Browse anonymously anywhere you go with the Onion Pi Tor proxy. This is fun weekend project that uses a Raspberry Pi, a USB WiFi adapter and Ethernet cable to create a small, low-power and portable privacy Pi.

William J Turkel[^]:

In the Linux and Unix operating systems, everything is treated as a file. Whenever possible, those files are stored as human- and machine-readable text files. As a result, Linux contains a large number of tools that are specialized for working with texts. Here we will use a few of these tools to explore a textual source.

Steve Klabnik[^]:

A month or two ago, I made a conscious decision that I would return to using as much Free Software as possible. The PRISM debacle of the last week confirmed my fears and reasoning, and so I made the decision to accelerate the schedule. Here’s what I did, and how you can, too.

Techdirt[^]:

Bloomberg came out with quite a bombshell last night, discussing how lots of tech companies apparently work with the NSA and other government agencies, not to pass data on users over to the government, but to share exploit information, sometimes before it's public or patched -- in some cases so it can be useful for the US government to use proactively. Last month, we had written about how the feds were certainly collecting hacks and vulnerabilities for offensive purposes, but it wasn't clear at the time that some of these exploits were coming directly from the companies themselves.

Groklaw[^]:

The Hon. David Nuffer has ruled on the SCO v. IBM motions, granting SCO's motion for reconsideration and reopening the case, which IBM did not object to.... The thing that makes predictions a bit murky is that there are some other motions, aside from the summary judgment motions, that were also not officially decided before SCO filed for bankruptcy that could, in SCO's perfect world, reopen certain matters. I believe they would have been denied, if the prior judge had had time to rule on them. Now? I don't know.

Storagezilla[^]:

Linux already runs on ARM and while Microsoft continue to play it cagey on their thoughts about ARM binaries for Windows Server, owning a Microsoft Surface I can tell you that Windows does run on ARM today even if there are still massive performance optimisations being pushed out on a regular basis.... While Windows RT is Windows 8 on ARM in 32 Bit Mode it proves ARM like PowerPC or DEC ALPHA in the Windows NT 4 days, is a viable target platform technically. Even if the business case for Windows Server just isn’t there yet.

TechHive[^]:

Citadel was the seventh Microsoft-led operation against botnets. While some researchers commend the company for causing financial pain to cybercriminals, other researchers see the operations as public relations stunts that run roughshod over their work to battle botnets. A Swiss researcher in the nonprofit organization abuse.ch said in a recent blog post that roughly a quarter of the 4000 domain names seized by Microsoft and redirected to its server were actually pointed to the systems of researchers gathering information on Citadel.

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Software Engineering Candies[^]
This article describes how to write unmaintainable code and have an excellent paid job for the rest of your life. The key skill to unmaintainable code is the obfuscation of the code - besides poor design, no test cases and overly complex algorithms. [...] If you really like to write well maintainable code, feel use this as input for things you shouldn't do in your next project.

CodeProject[^]:

My name is Ariya Hidayat. I live in Mountain View, California.... Right now I’m working for Sencha, a company focusing on web frameworks and tools. My recent responsibility is to architect and build the hybrid web runtime to allow our tools (written in HTML, JavaScript, CSS) run as desktop apps and enjoy native desktop integrations.

kunal-chowdhury.com[^]:

Let’s suppose you built an application which loads records in a Grid in a paginated manner. But when you loaded thousands of records, you noticed that, it is taking more time to load than the expected time and your boss was not happy with that. So, what to do? Are there any kind of proper solutions or workarounds to reduce this load time? If so, what are those? Let’s began with our post with a problem statement.

Visual C++ Team Blog[^]:

This post explains the flow of data within the Visual C++ compiler – starting with our C++ source program, and ending with a corresponding binary program. This post is an easy one – dipping our toes into the shallow end of ocean. Let's examine what happens when we compile a single-file program, stored in App.cpp, from the command-line. (If you were to launch the compilation from within Visual Studio, the diagram below would have to include higher layers of software; however, these end up emitting the very commands I'm about to describe).

Less Than Dot[^]:

SQL is hard. Who's to say whether it's harder for the person that has no technical background or the one that is comfortable with object oriented, procedural, or functional styles and has to cross the great divide to set-based, declarative queries. In either case, there's a journey ahead of you.

TechHive[^]:

Sony’s Open SmartWatch Project will make it possible for developers to create and install alternative software on the Sony SmartWatch.... Developers can already create apps for the SmartWatch, but with the Open SmartWatch project Sony is expanding the possibilities, according to a blog post on Thursday. Developers can take control of SmartWatch in new ways by creating and flashing their own alternative firmware. The project comes with a number of caveats. Consumers are strongly advised to keep the official tested and verified firmware, according to the blog post. Only developers completely sure of what they are doing should take part, it said.

jstorimer.com[^]:

The first time I heard mention of the GIL, it had nothing to do with how it worked, what it did, or why it existed. I only heard about that it was silly because it restricted parallelism or that it was great because it made my code thread-safe. In time, I've gotten more comfortable with multi-threaded programming, and realized that the world is more complicated than that. I wanted to know, at a deep technical level, how the GIL worked. Only, there's no specification for the GIL, and no documentation. It's essentially unspecified behaviour; an MRI implementation detail. The Ruby core team makes no promises about how it will work or what it guarantees.

Source: An OpenNews project[^]:

The word “visualization” once more readily described the act of creating a mental image in one’s mind, whereas today it’s far more likely to mean the graphical representation of information. We are living in an increasingly visual world, peering into screens of different sizes with incrementally superior resolutions at every device upgrade. We are also living in a world with more data available to us than ever before. IBM says that 90% of the world’s data was produced only in the last two years and that we produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily.

Paul Thurrotts WinInfo[^]:

The core issue might be that both Xbox One and Windows 8 represent bets on bigger, longer-term visions than today’s users aren't interested in hearing about, let alone dealing with day-to-day. But unlike with Windows 8, which is being retroactively “improved” with features that should have been there from the get-go, Microsoft still has a chance to “fix” Xbox One before it’s released. These fixes are easy to implement and should include...

The Next Web[^]:

Twitter has quietly opened up its various analytics tools to the public, giving everyone access to in-depth data about the people and brands who follow them, as well as the performance of their most recent tweets.... The Timeline activity displays a graph for the user based on the number of mentions, follows and unfollows that they’ve received over the last month. A detailed list underneath shows all of the user’s most recent tweets, including the number of times someone has favorited, retweeted or replied to it.

Binary Bonsai[^]:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs This quote was hauled out for the video presentation of this redesign, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to go ahead and wield it as a bit of a club. Because quite frankly it's talking the talk, but not quite walking the walk. It forgot the corollary to the quote, which is 'how it looks and feels informs the user how it works'.

Google Research Blog[^]:

This past October the state of the art seemed to move things a bit closer to toddler performance. A system which used deep learning and convolutional neural networks easily beat out more traditional approaches in the ImageNet computer vision competition designed to test image understanding.... We built and trained models similar to those from the winning team using software infrastructure for training large-scale neural networks developed at Google in a group started by Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng. When we evaluated these models, we were impressed; on our test set we saw double the average precision when compared to other approaches we had tried. We knew we had found what we needed to make photo searching easier for people using Google.