The Insider News

Troy Hunt[^]:

There’s this debate that goes round and round about a process that’s commonly known as responsible disclosure or in other words, notifying the owner of a system that their security sucks and giving them the opportunity to fix it rather than telling the great unwashed masses and letting them have at a vulnerable system. The theory goes that responsible disclosure is the ethical thing to do whilst airing website security dirty laundry publicly makes you an irresponsible cowboy, or something to that effect.

deskthority[^]:

When I became interested in alternate keyboard layouts about 3 years ago and researched possible more ergonomic alternatives, I also stumbled upon geekhack and was immediately drawn to the idea of starting my learning process with a new keyboard, which of course had to have mechanical switches.... Finally, when I had realized how much the custom layout - by now I had switched to AdNW - was making my day job as software developer more comfortable I decided to also get a better input device, and in lack of any interesting and affordable alternatives was soon tempted to build one myself...

Peter Gillard-Moss[^]:

Ask a room of developers what they’d do to help diagnose a live bug in their app. Most of them would say ‘add some logging’. Ask them how and they’d reply ‘use log4x to write to a log file’. They’d write some text out to a disk. There’s your problem. What only a very few would say is add some monitoring. Rather than write out a line to a file that says ‘Connecting to the database’ they’d record a key value pair for active database connections. Rather than writing out ‘Home page requested’ they’d prefer a meaningful data structure detailing the request received.

Code inComplete[^]:

I’ve been thinking about making a platform game recently, but I’ve never done one before, so I wanted to start small, very, very small! How about starting with just a tiny rectangle player character jumping around on some larger rectangle platforms.

AI Computer Vision[^]:

I just saw David Nolen give a talk at a LispNYC Meetup called: LISP is Too Powerful. It was a provocative and humorous talk. David showed all the powerful features of LISP and said that the reason why LISP is not more adapted is that it is too powerful. Everybody laughed but it made me think. LISP was decades ahead of other languages, why did it not become a mainstream language?

The Verge[^]:

While Surface Pro is making its way to additional markets this month, a new variant has arrived in Japan. Microsoft previously launched a region-specific Surface Pro in China, complete with a full copy of Office 2013, but the company is now offering a similar package in Japan. A 256GB model, with Windows 8 Pro and Office 2013, will be made available on June 7th. It's the first time Microsoft has increased the storage on Surface Pro from its 64GB and 128GB versions.

TechHive[^]:

Most people’s knowledge of Google Glass has been informed by a comedy skit, and that’s a dangerous situation. Sure, Fred Armisen’s SNL portrayal of Glass is hilarious, but it’s also full of gross inaccuracies that paint the headset as half-baked technology for nerds and porn addicts. Indeed, Glass has become the new Segway, and the people criticizing it most are those who’ve never used it, let alone seen it in person.

TidBITS[^]:

The battle for our technological hearts and minds is moving to our wrists and faces. Everyone seems to be racing to put a computer in your watch, while Google is leapfrogging several body parts to put one on your face.... Naturally, part of the breathless coverage of these devices — most of which still don’t exist — is the steady stream of pundit predictions about which device will be The One to Rule Them All, as well as which features “must” be included in order to provide their manufacturers Market Dominance for All Time. But the fact is, no one has any clue which devices will be successful, or if any of them will.

Betanews[^]:

Microsoft Windows 8 is the best desktop operating system. Period. No Linux distribution or OS X can compare. I say this as a Linux user and lover.... while I have left Linux as my desktop OS of choice, I am not leaving it entirely. I will still keep Ubuntu in a dual boot as my secondary OS. Linux distributions are still a great desktop OS choice and LibreOffice is very functional. And who knows, maybe one day Linux will be able to produce something better than Windows 8 on the desktop and I will switch back. I will still be using Linux daily when I use my Android phone and tablet or my Chromebook.