The Insider News

The Endeavour[^]:

Toward the end of his presentation Don’t fear the Monad, Brian Beckman makes an interesting observation. He says that early in the history of programming, languages split into two categories: those that start from the machine and add layers of abstraction, and those that start from mathematics and work their way down to the machine. These two branches are roughly the descendents of Fortran and Lisp respectively. Or more theoretically, these are descendents of the Turing machine and the lambda calculus.

Devhammer's Den[^]:

In this post, I'm going to show you how I can implement the same leaderboard service using a relatively new member of the ASP.NET stack, Web API. Web API is designed specifically for building services that are accessed via HTTP, and is a lightweight, yet highly customizable way of building RESTful services, and even supports OData as well. I'll also show you how easy it is to host services built using ASP.NET Web API using the new Windows Azure Web Sites feature.

Tools of Change for Publishing[^]:

2012 was a good year for Kindle developers. With the unveiling of the first-generation Fire tablet in late 2011 and the release of the KF8 Mobi format in early 2012, designing beautiful ebooks for the Kindle platform became a reality. KF8 introduced a fixed-layout specification for Kindle Fire, which opened the door to graphically rich titles—children’s books, graphic novels—in Mobi format. KF8 also greatly increased CSS2 compliance for standard reflowable ebooks, implemented a handful of CSS3 features (text shadow, rounded borders), and added support for embedded fonts.... But while 2012 marks a huge leap forward toward the incorporation of modern Web standards into the Kindle platform, there is still much room for improvement in terms of multimedia/interactivity, content rendering, and ease of ebook development. Here is my humble wish list of improvements for the Kindle platform for 2013.

Code School[^]:

R is a tool for statistics and data modeling. The R programming language is elegant, versatile, and has a highly expressive syntax designed around working with data. R is more than that, though — it also includes extremely powerful graphics capabilities. If you want to easily manipulate your data and present it in compelling ways, R is the tool for you.

iDeveloper TV[^]:

Selling software is more difficult if your users can’t give it a try first. Reputable developers such as Apple can charge a higher price for theirs because people know the quality they produce. But what if you’re not widely known? Are enough people going to take a gamble on you? If they have to pay you a reasonable price probably not. Outside the App Store we’re used to 30-day trial software, we’ve had it for years. This allows people to see whether your software is worth what you say its worth without taking a risk up-front.

Smashing Magazine[^]:

In the late ’90s Microsoft was selling a million copies of Word each month and gave away 14 fonts with its program. Its knock-off of Helvetica is called Arial.... As it spread over the graphic landscape like melted runny processed cheese, I suggested renaming it Velveetica. Its blandness and general horridness oozed out on all sides. It was neutral, but also tasteless and was taking over typography. Nothing could stop it as designers unquestioningly copied one another in adopting it. The idea that it was more modern than Gill Sans or Futura has more holes in it than Swiss cheese.

NYTimes.com[^]:

For the first time in years, Apple will manufacture computers in the United States, the chief executive of Apple, Timothy D. Cook, said in interviews with NBC and Bloomberg Businessweek. “Next year, we will do one of our existing Mac lines in the United States,” he said in an interview to be broadcast Thursday.... Apple, the biggest company in the world by market value, moved most of its manufacturing to Asia in the late 1990s. As an icon of American technology success and innovation, the California-based company has been criticized in recent years for outsourcing jobs abroad.

adafruit industries blog[^]:

Today’s video game consoles are as powerful and as complex as a personal computer, with elaborate security systems designed specifically to keep do-it-yourselfers out. They contain dozens of customized or special-purpose parts, and it takes some serious wizardry to do anything with them other than exactly what the manufacturer intended. These systems are discouragingly complicated. It’s so hard to see any common link between the circuits you can build at home, and the complex electrical engineering that goes into an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3. We wanted to build something different. Our platform has no controller, no television. The system itself is the game world. To make this happen, we had to take our engineering back to basics too. This is a game platform built using parts that aren’t fundamentally different from the Arduino or Maple boards that tens of thousands of makers are using right now.

The Industry[^]:

Since the creation of touch screens, gestures have reigned in an entirely new aspect as to how we interact with our devices. As designers, we often only focus on the visual aspects of design, but hidden beneath (or above?) the visuals of what we create, there is an otherwise invisible concept. Gestures allow users to perform specific tasks in an extremely efficient and more dynamic manner. Some of the gestures we’re most used to are swipe to unlock, pinch to zoom, and pull to refresh. While those are relatively basic by most means, gestures have evolved greatly. Third party developers have began to truly utilize the potential that multi-touch displays hold, all within their apps.

Reuters:

Guatemalan police arrested U.S. software guru John McAfee on Wednesday for illegally entering the country and said it would expel him to neighboring Belize, which he fled after being sought for questioning over his neighbor's murder.

Fabulous Adventures In Coding[^]:

No matter how we choose to think about the grammar, it is certainly the case that try-catch-finally is different than if and while and for and so on; try-catch-finally requires a braced block. That seems inconsistent; is there a justification for this inconsistency?

StrathWeb[^]:

On this blog, I’ve been focusing pretty much exclusively on ASP.NET Web API, but today let’s step outside .NET, and explore how you could host RESTful HTTP services directly from the native unmanaged C++ code – and I hope, this is going to be a very interesting journey, especially as C++ is so much more efficient than any managed language. If you haven’t done C++ before, or haven’t done any in years, don’t dread, modern C++ is quite different than what you might be used to.

The Geek Girl: Tara's Developer Ramblings from the Dorm[^]:

The game you will be making in this walkthrough is using the MSDN Shooter tutorial. Shooter is a particular type of game with a set of well-defined limits around what it does when the user interacts with it. This tutorial is a good starting point for learning game development with XNA and publishing a game running on Windows 8 platform using XNA leveraging MonoGame. In addition to leveraging this technology for Windows 8, you can use the MonoGame technology for native cross-platform development with other mobile platforms.

Kenny Kerr[^]:

I was quite surprised when the veil of secrecy over the Windows Phone 8 SDK was finally lifted and it was revealed that its API had in fact very little in common with the Windows 8 API. Windows 8 essentially provides two APIs for writing (Metro) apps. There’s the XAML API and then there’s Direct3D.... Great! I can write a native C++ app using Direct3D and by extension Direct2D. Direct2D is after all just a user-mode library built on top of Direct3D, but a very important one at that. It powers such notable apps as Internet Explorer on both Windows and Windows Phone. Then to my horror, I get to the bottom of this page and I see this...

.net magazine[^]:

Mark Penfold takes a look at 10 of the best new tools to see the light of day in November. There are utilities for handling menus, forms, prototyping and more. This month has a very pragmatic feel to it. Lots of problem-solving applications. If they were carpenters' tools, they'd be the interesting little ones that appear just out of reach on a silhouette of their own above and behind the craftsman's workbench.

nand2tetris.org[^]:

This site supports a course and a textbook that guide students and self-learners through the construction of a modern, full-scale computer system - hardware and software - from the ground up. In the process, the students practice many major computer science (CS) abstractions studied in typical CS courses and make them concrete through 12 guided implementation projects. The lectures, book chapters and projects are highly modular and one can pursue subsets of them in any desired order and scope. All the software tools and course materials can be downloaded freely and in open source from this site.

TechRepublic[^]:

Software that is commonly overlooked though essential is video or printer drivers (or other hardware). You may not realize that some of this software is written using PowerBASIC. There’s a good reason why this is the case. Programming languages have changed a lot since the old days when compiler makers were noted for counting CPU cycles and benchmarking them for speed. Today many programming languages produce resource hungry applications that end users often complain are slow and/or bloated. The people at PowerBASIC never lost that love of counting CPU cycles and benchmarking their compilers and are experts with Intel/AMD CPU machine language. This mindset, plus a reputation for rock solid compilers, has produced a current generation of compilers for Windows. If you want fast, reliable software with an amazingly small footprint, PowerBASIC is worth a look.