The Insider News

I Programmer[^]:

You have to be some optimist if you believe that Silverlight has any future in the new Microsoft, but it is still interesting if sad to watch as the edifice is taken down. The news today is that the Silverlight-specific website has been removed and all we have now is a mess of broken links. Now only the far flung reaches of Microsoft, such as Microsoft Research, still make use of Silverlight for new projects.

Dr Dobb's[^]:

Return values and exceptions are both inadequate tools for handling errors. But we're stuck with them for the foreseeable future — just as we have been for decades.

spinellis.gr[^]:

A substitution of a comma with a period in project Mercury's working Fortran code compromised the accuracy of the results, rendering them unsuitable for longer orbital missions. How probable are such events and how does a programming language's design affect their likelihood and severity? In a paper I recently presented at the 4th Annual International Workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools I showed results obtained by randomly perturbing similar programs written in diverse languages to see whether the compiler or run-time system would detect those changes as errors, or whether these would end-up generating incorrect output.

0xdabbad00.com[^]:

DEP and ASLR are two simple protections every Windows binary should be implementing. For a developer to use them, all they need to do is compile with any version of Visual Studio since 2005, and it should be the default setting. If you are compiling Windows code, you should be using Visual Studio, and even if you use a different compiler, it should still have options for DEP and ASLR. Enabling DEP and ASLR, I believe, is the easiest thing a developer can do to improve the security of their code. Obviously, you can still have DEP and ASLR and still have the buggiest, sloppiest, most insecure code, but all you need to do is turn on two linker settings and instantly memory corruption exploits become much more difficult to exploit.

Rugged Circuits[^]:

Use a sledgehammer, fire a bullet at it, throw it into a pool....that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re going to show you how to electrically destroy your Arduino, though many of you seem to already know how to do that through unfortunate experience. You know what we mean....that funny smell, the scorch mark on a component, or the dreaded “programmer not in sync” error message -- all signs that you’ve just learned a lesson the hard way. Why are we doing this? If you own an Arduino, it’s good to know what is and what isn’t OK to do with it.

Massively Parallel Procrastination[^]:

In early 2012, I ran across a fascinating project on the keyboard forums at geekhack.org. The ErgoDox is a project by some gifted hobbyists to build a split ergonomic keyboard inspired by the Key64 Project. The Key64, in turn, counts the µTron, TypeMatrix, Maltron and Kinesis keyboards among its influences.... As soon as I saw it, I signed up to buy an ErgoDox kit when the folks designing it were ready to start the group-buy process. Here's the build process in depth.

Jeremy's .NET Blog[^]:

So last week I showed how to set up a web server on the Raspberry Pi. Many people pointed out that Apache probably isn’t the best option for the Pi. So I decided to do a little speed test to see which server would be the fastest if you were going to build a Raspberry Pi Webserver. This is a good way to compare how each server will run on low powered hardware.

All this[^]:

It’s sometimes argued that mathematical analysis in the 18th century flourished in Europe and languished in England because the English stubbornly held on to fluxions, while the Bernoullis, Euler, Lagrange, etc. happily adopted differentials. If you fight through the math in Gilbert’s paper, you’ll appreciate that argument. I knew that England was late to change but was surprised to see fluxions still being used as late as 1826. It didn’t last much longer.

IFTF[^]:

What do you do when you want to manufacture and sell a toy? A few years ago I would have told you to start with a prototype, do some patent research, try to get in touch with a manufacturer, and somehow license the idea. This is what I did, or at least tried to do. But that was a few years ago, and now we live in the future! And in this future everyone has the tools to make potentially anything. This is the story of how I tried to bring a toy to market, failed, but then made it anyways, and now I'm letting the internet decide if it is worth manufacturing on a large scale.

Syncfusion Ebooks[^]:

Objective-C Succinctly is the only book you need for getting started with Objective-C—the primary language beneath all Mac, iPad, and iPhone apps. Written by Ryan Hodson, the author behind our popular Knockout.js Succinctly and PDF Succinctly titles, this e-book guides you from downloading Xcode, Apple's Objective-C IDE, to utilizing advanced features like blocks (similar to C#'s lambdas) and protocols.

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.