The Insider News

Ars Technica[^]:

Even though Windows Server 2012 is less than a year old, Microsoft promises a stack of new features for the R2 iteration. Hyper-V, in particular, has some compelling improvements: legacy-free, UEFI-booting "generation 2" virtual machines, faster live migration, live cloning of VMs, online disk resizing, and support for live migration, backup, disk resizing, and dynamic memory for Linux guests.

math-blog.com[^]:

But...is programming really that easy? If so, why do programmers make so much money? Well, real programming is often very complex. Real programs are usually anywhere from several thousand lines of code to hundreds, even millions of lines of code. They are much more complex than teaching examples like "Hello world" programs. Secondly, real programs usually have much higher reliability and quality requirements than a class project or software that the programmer writes for his or her own personal use or fun.

Digital Scofflaw[^]:

Google Reader is going away in a little under a month. There was a lot of consternation early on, but I think most people have realized that Google’s unwillingness to either kill or develop Reader was sucking all the life out of RSS. Many readers gained prominence after the announcement, and most people have settled on one by now. I tried four of the top contenders, and have some thoughts on them.

AnandTech[^]:

As a programmer who wants to write decent performing code, I am very interested in understanding the architectures of CPUs and GPUs. However, unlike desktop and server CPUs, mobile CPU and GPU vendors tend to do very little architectural disclosure.... We've done quite a bit of low-level mobile CPU analysis at AnandTech in pursuit of understanding architectures where there is no publicly available documentation. In this spirit, I wrote a few synthetic tests to better understand the performance of current-gen ARM CPU cores without having to rely upon vendor supplied information.

Sayed Ibrahim Hashimi[^]:

Have you ever wanted to use Visual Studio to manage project artifacts but wanted to have a fully custom build process? The recommend way to do this is to build a Custom Visual Studio Project System, but there is a much easier way for lightweight needs. In this post I’ll show you how to take an existing project and “replace” the build process used? For example, wouldn’t it be cool if you could develop a Chrome Extension with VS? When you do a build it would be great to generate the .zip file to for the Chrome Gallery in the output folder. Doing this is way easier than you might think.

Nettuts+[^]:

I recently finished Martin Odersky’s Scala course and I found it very difficult to figure out how to get started. You know, that first step when you want to start coding, but you don’t know what tools are at your disposal, what IDE to use, or which unit testing framework to choose. This tutorial will be about you, the newcomer to Scala, preparing your development environment so you can get started more easily.

ITworld[^]:

Most experienced developers can think of a time when they worked on a team with other accomplished programmers. Yet the code quality was anywhere from “eh” to “oh god you didn’t actually ship that did you?!” Here’s how this can happen, and what to do to minimize the chances it’ll happen to you.

Kenneth Auchenberg[^]:

At [Google IO] I had a chat with Paul Irish and Pavel Feldman on where the Chrome developers tools are headed, which has spurred me to write this blog post. The web development workflow has been on my mind for a while.... The past 5 years we have fundamentally changed the way we use the browser. The browser is no longer a simple document reader; instead it’s a complex application runtime that runs realtime GPU accelerated applications. But we have a problem. Our tools are still based on the assumption that we are inspecting simple documents that have formatting on top, and a few lines of JavaScript on the side.

ScottGu's Blog[^]:

Prior to today, when you stopped a VM on Windows Azure we kept a reserved deployment spot for it inside one of our compute clusters, and continued to bill you for the VM compute unless you explicitly deleted the deployment. Now, with today’s update, when you stop a VM we no longer charge you any compute time for it while it is stopped – yet we still preserve the deployment state and configuration. This makes it incredibly easy to stop VMs when you aren’t actively using them to avoid billing charges, and then restart them when you want to use them again.

Ars Technica[^]:

On top of bringing back a Taskbar-visible Start button, Windows 8.1 will give enterprises a lot more control over the operating system's appearance. Chief among these controls is the ability to boot straight to the desktop, a feature found in prerelease versions of Windows 8 but not officially supported in the final version. Additionally, IT departments can now exact more control over the Start screen, fixing its layout and prepopulating it with tiles for corporate apps.

ZDNet[^]:

I suspect that most of the people reading this piece are not the types to run unsecured networks. But if you do see them in your neighborhood, try to find out who owns them, and educate whoever is running them to replace their older router equipment (particularly if they are only capable of using WEP, as opposed to the newer WPA2 standard) and to set the appropriate WLAN passwords and to use Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) with their devices when possible.

NYTimes.com[^]:

The word “data” connotes fixed numbers inside hard grids of information, and as a result, it is easily mistaken for fact. But including bad product introductions and wars, we have many examples of bad data causing big mistakes. Big Data raises bigger issues. The term suggests assembling many facts to create greater, previously unseen truths. It suggests the certainty of math. That promise of certainty has been a hallmark of the technology industry for decades. With Big Data, however, there are even more hazards, some human and some inherent in the technology.

ReadWrite[^]:

Developers expect, no, demand free tools and services to do their jobs. Whether it is analytic services, integrated development environments (IDEs), application programming interfaces (APIs) or software developer kits (SDKs), developers almost always refuse to pay for the tools they use to do their jobs. Many developers would rather go out of their way to build their own tools or use bug-ridden free tools than plunk down the money it would take to buy a service or subscription that could actually help them do their jobs more efficiently.

Implementing the Repository Pattern with CakePHP

I must admit, my recent articles are becoming a bit obsessed around the repository pattern. What can I say, I like it, it’s useful, and it’s not restrictive based on a language or a framework.

I’ve long professed how I dislike convoluted controllers. CakePHP’s find method almost immediately causes this when used inside a controller. More importantly, the code inside the find method is extremely unreadable. This is almost more important than a large controller function!