The Insider News

Embedded in Academia[^]:

It’s not uncommon for an empirical CS researcher to get a review saying something like “Sure, these results look good, but we need to reject the paper since the authors never proved anything about the worst case.” Similarly, when I interviewed for faculty jobs ten years ago, a moderately famous professor spent a while grilling me about the worst-case performance of a static analysis tool that I had written. This was, to me, an extremely uninteresting topic but luckily there’s an easy answer for that particular class of tool. I recall noticing that he did not seem particularly interested in what the tool did, or if it was actually useful.

@FredKSchott[^]:

Today we’re announcing CoVim, a plugin that adds multi-user, real-time collaboration to your favorite (or least favorite) text editor. CoVim allows you to remotely code, write, edit, and collaborate, all within your custom Vim configuration. Originally started as a senior capstone project for Tufts University, we’re now open-sourcing it to give the world one of Vim’s most requested features.

MSDN Magazine[^]:

Graph analysis is becoming increasingly important in software applications. Here a graph is a collection of nodes and edges, not a data visualization such as a bar chart. This article presents a demonstration of how to perform shortest-path analysis using a SQL CLR stored procedure. The techniques presented here can also be used for many other data-access programming tasks.

absorptions[^]:

Voice inversion is a method of scrambling radio conversations to render speech nearly unintelligible in ordinary radio receivers. As the name implies, it inverts the audio spectrum of a signal, making the lowest frequencies the highest and vice versa. It is not considered encryption; it's merely a sort of Pig Latin on analogue signals..., Voice inversion is cancelled by reapplying the inversion, i.e. inverting the audio spectrum again. Here I'll present some least-effort digital descrambling methods for the voice inversion scrambler that may be of interest to hobbyist listeners.

MailChimp[^]:

Despite its popularity, PHP is considered by the programming elite, almost without exception, as one of the worst languages currently in use today. The term “good PHP programmer” is considered an oxymoron. Yet it’s the primary language we use here for development, and it’s the only language we use for everything touching the production MailChimp application. You can imagine the horror and surprise we see when we try to tell a good developer that we use PHP to solve cool and interesting problems. So here’s my best answer to that.

Windows IT Pro[^]:

This month, I’d like to evaluate where Microsoft is in its transition to a maker of devices and services. This is the biggest transition in the company’s history, one that will affect customers and users. Using Microsoft’s most recent earnings release, let’s rate the company’s progress and determine which strategic transitions might affect you.

programming in the twenty-first century[^]:

Those were the days of processors living below the 2 MHz threshold, with each instruction run to completion before even considering the next. No floating point math. Barely any integer math, come to think of it: no multiplication or division and sums of more than 255 required two additions. But that kind of lively statistic slinging doesn't tell the whole story or else there wouldn't have been so many animated games running--usually at sixty frames-per-second--on what appears to be incapable hardware. I can't speak to all the systems that were available, but I can talk about the Atari 800 I learned to program on.

Ars Technica[^]:

As computer games became more and more complex in the late 1980s, the days of the individual developer seemed to be waning. For a young teenager sitting alone in his room, the dream of creating the next great game by himself was getting out of reach. Yet out of this dilemma these same kids invented a unique method of self-expression, something that would end up enduring longer than Commodore itself. In fact, it still exists today. This was the demo scene.

engadget.com[^]:

The latest update out of the currently unfolding announcement in Redmond: the next-generation Xbox will run three operating systems simultaneously. Complementing Windows 8 and RT on PCs and tablets, there'll be a third distinct version of Microsoft's operating system that has been pared down specifically for the new console. This will be the main system OS used to run apps such as Skype and other non-game titles downloaded from the Xbox storefront.

codeasp.net[^]:

I have seen many programmers having confusion between PUT vs POST while making REST API. Before starting my article let me put the following statements you have already encountered with: PUT should be used to create and POST should be used to update. POST should be used to create and PUT should be used to update. If you are following these statements sctrictly, both of them are not correct!. It is not mandatory that you have to use both PUT and POST in our application, it depends on what is the requirement.

Dream.In.Code[^]:

This tutorial will cover basic algorithm analysis, specifically the time complexity of algorithms. The tools used include Big-O, Big-Omega, and Big-Theta. This tutorial will also discuss some of the mathematical properties of Big-O, Big-Omega, and Big-Theta.

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.

Steves Computer Vision Blog[^]:

This script enables you to control your computer via text message. Think of it almost as a version of SSH over text message. It is designed to intelligently and quickly check unread Google voice messages. If certain parameters are passed, it runs the command you send and returns the result.

Boing Boing[^]:

Usborne's 1983 classic Introduction to Machine Code for Beginners is an astounding book, written, designed and illustrated by Naomi Reed, Graham Round and Lynne Norman. It uses beautiful infographics and clear writing to provide an introduction to 6502 and Z80 assembler, and it's no wonder that used copies go for as much as $600.