The Insider News

Bill Reiss' Development Blog[^]:

With all of the hype about HTML 5, it sounded like we were on the way to web development nirvana where as long as you coded to the HTML 5 spec, things would “just work”. This is a great idea and it would be true except for the fact that developers are not coding to the HTML 5 spec, they are making sure that their stuff works great with WebKit based browsers. You can’t blame them since Safari and Chrome use WebKit, and therefore a huge majority of their mobile users are on WebKit. The W3C sees the danger of this and is very concerned that WebKit could become the defacto standard.

Ars Technica[^]:

A previously unknown and currently unpatched security hole in the latest version of the Java software framework is under attack online, according to security researchers and bloggers. Attack code that exploits vulnerability in Java's browser plugin has been added to the Blackhole, Cool, Nuclear Pack, and Redkit exploit kits, according to the Malware Don't Need Coffee blog, prompting its author to say that the bug is being "massively exploited in the wild."

Gamasutra[^]:

When going back to replay classic games I played as a kid to mine them for knowledge, I always fear that any games from the NES era or earlier are too old to learn much from. I tend to assume that many elements of modern design will be missing: no training, bad difficulty ramping, haphazard level design, and so forth. Before writing this article, I was under the impression that many "good design principles" I've come to know and love were invented during the SNES era and iterated on from there. The NES was the Wild West of game development, I thought, lawless and free.... As it turns out, I was totally wrong! Instead of finding something outdated with a ton of nostalgia value, I found an excellent primer in the fundamentals of non-linear game design.

The Industry[^]:

2013 should be a wonderful year for designers and developers alike. More opportunities are presenting themselves each day and with those opportunities, risks are taken and trends are set. We’ll see which of these trends survive and which ones may not come to fruition. Are there any other ones you feel will take 2013 by storm?

Paul Hammant's blog[^]:

Perforce is not designed for end-user applications. It is designed for developers, and to store source code (and related bits and pieces). We’re ignoring that, and using where we could have used CouchDB, Postgres or one of a hundred other choices. Why Perforce and not a SQL or a NoSQL database? Branches and merge-ability. Why Perforce and not Git/GitHub? Permissions per branch....

Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day[^]:

The free TFS Source Control History Visualization extension for Visual Studio 2012, based on the Gource tool project and created by Alexander Biryukov.... Not sure if it's something I'd use often, but that doesn't take away from it's shear coolness!

MSDN Magazine[^]:

For almost a decade now, I’ve been coding for various .NET platforms using C# and XAML, so when Microsoft unveiled Windows 8, of course it was great to see a XAML-based framework in the Windows 8 API. At the same time, I was quite intrigued to see support of C++, not as a managed language but to generate native code, and moreover, to see an extensive DirectX API that can be accessed only from C++.

Web Dev .NET[^]:

I recently became curious as to when browser sniffing might ever be acceptable. I mean, surely there must be a valid use case even if it isn't pretty. So, I went on a search on Twitter and I also polled some of my close developer friends on their thoughts. The following is a list of my findings.

LuaHashMap[^]:

When writing LuaHashMap, the biggest question was always, "How is the performance?". The dogma is that it should be slow since it's going through an interpreter ("scripting language"). But wisdom demands benchmarks before making unsubstantiated claims.... So this seemed like a good basis to start a new round of benchmarks. But why stop at Lua? So let's do a whole suite of interpreted languages that would otherwise be dismissed. So I'm incorportating Lua, Python, Ruby, Perl, and Tcl.

Math ∩ Programming[^]:

Probability theory underlies a huge portion of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics, and a number of our future posts will rely on the ideas and terminology we lay out in this post. Our first formal theory of machine learning will be deeply ingrained in probability theory, we will derive and analyze probabilistic learning algorithms, and our entire treatment of mathematical finance will be framed in terms of random variables. And so it’s about time we got to the bottom of probability theory.

#2782[^]:

Really you should do yourself a huge favor. The next time one of your friends suggests you write a book, just ignore them. That’ll also save you the onerous task of reading the rest of this post. Still reading? Oh dear. Well I guess I feel compelled to inflict some well meant advice. This is based on collaborating on three books in the last few years. I’ve also written numerous technical papers, a PhD thesis (i.e. another book) and several published articles. Glutton for punishment, that’s me.

GigaOM[^]:

Until now, the mobile revolution has been about squeezing the desktop internet onto portable devices. Entrepreneur Edward Aten says the real revolution for smartphones is about fulfilling a whole new set of needs that people have in their daily lives.

unsane.info[^]:

I was introducing “Alien” (1979) last night to Darren and a couple of friends, and at one point when we paused the movie, we paused, not to discuss the relative merits of the thriller genre, or chestbursters, but the computers that were envisaged when the movie was produced. I’m not talking about the displays, mind you; while they’re incredibly primitive, they’re a symptom of the time and they can be accepted as having a certain kitsch nostalgia.... What’s most noticeable though is how computers were presented.