The Insider News

Dr Dobb's[^]:

Return values and exceptions are both inadequate tools for handling errors. But we're stuck with them for the foreseeable future — just as we have been for decades.

spinellis.gr[^]:

A substitution of a comma with a period in project Mercury's working Fortran code compromised the accuracy of the results, rendering them unsuitable for longer orbital missions. How probable are such events and how does a programming language's design affect their likelihood and severity? In a paper I recently presented at the 4th Annual International Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools I showed results obtained by randomly perturbing similar programs written in diverse languages to see whether the compiler or run-time system would detect those changes as errors, or whether these would end-up generating incorrect output.

Rugged Circuits[^]:

Use a sledgehammer, fire a bullet at it, throw it into a pool....that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re going to show you how to electrically destroy your Arduino, though many of you seem to already know how to do that through unfortunate experience. You know what we mean....that funny smell, the scorch mark on a component, or the dreaded “programmer not in sync” error message -- all signs that you’ve just learned a lesson the hard way. Why are we doing this? If you own an Arduino, it’s good to know what is and what isn’t OK to do with it.

Massively Parallel Procrastination[^]:

In early 2012, I ran across a fascinating project on the keyboard forums at geekhack.org. The ErgoDox is a project by some gifted hobbyists to build a split ergonomic keyboard inspired by the Key64 Project. The Key64, in turn, counts the µTron, TypeMatrix, Maltron and Kinesis keyboards among its influences.... As soon as I saw it, I signed up to buy an ErgoDox kit when the folks designing it were ready to start the group-buy process. Here's the build process in depth.

Jeremy's .NET Blog[^]:

So last week I showed how to set up a web server on the Raspberry Pi. Many people pointed out that Apache probably isn’t the best option for the Pi. So I decided to do a little speed test to see which server would be the fastest if you were going to build a Raspberry Pi Webserver. This is a good way to compare how each server will run on low powered hardware.

All this[^]:

It’s sometimes argued that mathematical analysis in the 18th century flourished in Europe and languished in England because the English stubbornly held on to fluxions, while the Bernoullis, Euler, Lagrange, etc. happily adopted differentials. If you fight through the math in Gilbert’s paper, you’ll appreciate that argument. I knew that England was late to change but was surprised to see fluxions still being used as late as 1826. It didn’t last much longer.

IFTF[^]:

What do you do when you want to manufacture and sell a toy? A few years ago I would have told you to start with a prototype, do some patent research, try to get in touch with a manufacturer, and somehow license the idea. This is what I did, or at least tried to do. But that was a few years ago, and now we live in the future! And in this future everyone has the tools to make potentially anything. This is the story of how I tried to bring a toy to market, failed, but then made it anyways, and now I'm letting the internet decide if it is worth manufacturing on a large scale.

Syncfusion Ebooks[^]:

Objective-C Succinctly is the only book you need for getting started with Objective-C—the primary language beneath all Mac, iPad, and iPhone apps. Written by Ryan Hodson, the author behind our popular Knockout.js Succinctly and PDF Succinctly titles, this e-book guides you from downloading Xcode, Apple's Objective-C IDE, to utilizing advanced features like blocks (similar to C#'s lambdas) and protocols.