The Insider News

Colby Cosh - Macleans.ca[^]

The whole world is suddenly talking about election pundit Nate Silver, and as a longtime heckler of Silver I find myself at a bit of a loss. These days, Silver is saying all the right things about statistical methodology and epistemological humility; he has written what looks like a very solid popular book about statistical forecasting; he has copped to being somewhat uncomfortable with his status as an all-seeing political guru, which tends to defuse efforts to make a nickname like “Mr. Overrated” stick...

The situation is that many of Nate Silver’s attackers don’t really know what the hell they are talking about. Unfortunately, this gives them something in common with many of Nate Silver’s defenders, who greet any objection to his standing or methods with cries of “Are you against SCIENCE? Are you against MAAATH?” If science and math are things you do appreciate and favour, I would ask you to resist the temptation to embody them in some particular person. Silver has had more than enough embarrassing faceplants in his life as an analyst that this should be obvious.

Amar's blog[^]:

As developers, we start exploring any new platform/framework/language with a traditional “Hello World” program. Windows 8 is a re-imagined new OS, and so I thought let’s re-imagine the “Hello World” too. Consultant Jargon is my non-traditional version of “Hello World”.

Robert MacLean[^]:

I have written in a previous post (What do you get from being a lock screen app?) about how your background processing has a limited amount of time to do it’s processing in, what the odd unit of measurement used (the CPU second) and the overflow bucket. Even with the thinking it is hard to understand what you can accomplish in the time available, so help let’s look at what an app I built (Bing my lockscreen) does in it’s time.

Fronteers 2012[^]:

Viewports are pretty easy on desktop: they're the browser window. Thus, an element with width: 10% will span 10% of the browser window, while width: 100px just means a width of 100px. On mobile, things are quite different. There are two viewports and three kinds of pixels, and they interact in all kinds of weird ways—ways that depend on the browser. In this technical presentation PPK will explain why a pixel is not a pixel, what the difference between the two viewports is, and which bits web developers should care about. Caution: Heads may explode!

Dan Shipper[^]:

I am a terrible programmer. I don’t comment my code very well. Sometimes I ignore the DRY principle. I tend not to use fancy tertiary statements, or worry too much about whitespace. My data structures can get ugly sometimes. But in other ways, I (dare I say it) am a pretty good programmer....

David Walsh[^]:

The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs. Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers. Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a step in the right direction. I recently shared with you 5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed in the hope that some of them would inspire you to improve your own web apps. I'd like to share with you 5 more lessor known HTML5 APIs -- hopefully you find some of them useful!

Dream.In.Code[^]:

It seems like there is a lot of sentiment that VB6 is pretty much useless to learn anymore. I'm not sure I agree with that position personally, but I wanted to throw it out there and see what sorts of responses we got. I particularly want to explore reasons other than the "maintain the vast body of legacy code out there" reason. A couple of things that occur to me personally are the ease of creating and using COM objects, and the ease of creating wrappers for the Win32 API.