The Insider News

Matt Might[^]:

The halting problem asks whether the execution of a specific program for a given input will terminate. The halting problem is famous for being undecidable. That is, no algorithm can solve it for all programs and all inputs. This complicates any attempt to predict program behavior: we can make predicting almost any program behavior equivalent to predicting the termination of a nearly identical program. Static analyses are algorithms that do their best to defy the undecidability of the halting problem: they attempt to predict program behavior.

Debugging Toolbox[^]:

There are many free tools used to troubleshoot and debug software. Below I present a list of the tools that my peers and I use most of the time. Though most of the tools below are free Microsoft tools, not all are very well known.

Nettuts+[^]:

When you hear the word “algorithm,” you probably respond in one of three ways: 1. You immediately know and understand what we’re talking about because you studied computer science. 2. You know that algorithms are the workhorses of companies like Google and Facebook, but you aren’t really sure what the word means. 3. You run and hide in fear because everything you know about algorithms reminds you of high-school Calculus nightmares. If you are one of the second two, this article is for you.

Maurice Naftalin[^]:

The long debate about how to introduce lambda expressions (aka closures) into Java is approaching an important moment: the implementation of lambdas and virtual extension methods is planned to be feature-complete by the end of January 2013 and officially shipped in JDK 8 the following September. The biggest changes in the language since Java 5—at least—are not far away now.

Dave Fayram[^]:

There is sort of a running meme in programming culture that programmers cannot “program”, meaning that lots of people who are in the software industry making a living as software engineers actually are not very proficient at programing outside of very narrow specialties. So you hear a lot about dreadful interview processes that companies resort to, trying to find the best programmers. Generally, there isn’t much thought given to these problems, which is a shame sometimes.

Windows Sysinternals[^]:

PsPing is a command-line utility for measuring network performance. In addition to standard ICMP ping functionality, it can report the latency of connecting to TCP ports, the latency of TCP round-trip communication between systems, and the TCP bandwidth available to a connection between systems. Besides obtaining min, max, and average values in 0.01ms resolution, you can also use PsPing to generate histograms of the results that are easy to import into spreadsheets.

The Codist[^]:

If you aren't curious about the world of programming and other related technology areas then your programming career isn't going to last. Most of the people I knew who got Computer Science degrees when I was in college no longer program anything; they lost interest, or stopped learning and eventually got run over by the new technology steamroller.

betashop[^]:

On October 27, 2010 I wrote a blog post about the “57 Things I Learned Founding 3 Tech Companies.” This past week while I was in Tokyo for meetings with potential partners for Fab, I was invited to participate in a panel discussion on startups. The discussion quickly turned to those 57 things. Amazing. Thousands of miles away and two years later, people still want to talk about those 57 things! As the questions came in, I realized that my 2010 list was great for what I had learned as of 2 years ago, but it also was in desperate need of an update to include what I’ve learned more recently, especially as we’ve pivoted from fabulis to Fab in 2011 and then scaled Fab to more than 7.5 million registered users, 7500 supplier partners, 600 team members, and a run-rate of more than $150M in sales in just 15 months.

SciGuy[^]:

Something very, very interesting is happening with Voyager 1, the human probe that’s the very farthest from Earth. New data from the spacecraft, which I will discuss below, indicate Voyager 1 may have exited the solar system for good. If true, this would mark a truly historic moment for the human race — sending a spacecraft beyond the edge of our home solar system.

All this[^]:

I find it really hard to watch baseball nowadays because the game moves so slowly, but I do still like to look at statistics and standings. The standings in Yahoo! Sports include a figure that was uncommon when I was a kid: the teams’ run differential, the difference their runs scored and runs given up. I decided to see how well a team’s run differential predicts its final record.