The Insider News

Smashing Coding[^]:

At Velocity 2011, Nicole Sullivan and I introduced CSS Lint, the first code-quality tool for CSS. We had spent the previous two weeks coding like crazy, trying to create an application that was both useful for end users and easy to modify. Neither of us had any experience launching an open-source project like this, and we learned a lot through the process.

Eli Bendersky[^]:

In this article I want to present a cool and little-known feature of assemblers called "relaxation". Relaxation is cool because it’s one of those things that are apparent in hindsight ("of course this should be done"), but is non-trivial to implement and has some interesting algorithms behind it. While relaxation is applicable to several CPU architectures and more than one kind of instructions, for this article I will focus on jumps for the Intel x86-64 architecture.

Arctic.js[^]:

Arctic.js is a game engine for smartphone web browsers written in JavaScript with HTML5 Canvas. It provides a hierarchical display lists, event propagation and useful animation features. These features are used through ActionScript3 friendly APIs which Flash developers are familier to.

ashfurrow.com[^]:

If you code Objective-C, this is going to offend you and that's good. If you aren't offended, then you don't care, and that's bad. This list isn't about stylistic things like which line new braces go on (new ones, duh). This list is about potential problems with the code you're writing on an objective scale. So let's get started.

Cemetech[^]:

jsTIfied is an online graphing calculator emulator, emulating the TI-83 Plus, TI-83 Plus Silver Edition, TI-84 Plus, and TI-84 Plus Silver Edition. It runs entirely in your browser using HTML5 and Javascript, so it requires neither Java nor Flash.... In order to understand how it works, you must know a little bit about how graphing calculators (or any basic embedded system) works. I'll give you a very high-level overview, assuming you know the basics of computer architecture theory and practice.

Jim O'Neil[^]:

As I’m sure you've heard, Windows Phone 8 and Windows Store (nee Metro) applications share a common core operating system, and that’s great news for developers looking to take advantage of both platforms with a single or complementary applications. The common core does not, however, mean that the platforms are identical – in fact, only about 1/3 of the Windows Runtime API members are available on both platforms, and there are some APIs that are specific to either Windows Phone or Windows 8 due the unique experiences or features of the hardware.

ZDNet[^]:

Intel is unbeatable in the laptop space today, but the combination of the popularity of tablets and the laws of physics at 19nm scale and below makes you wonder where they will be in five to 10 years' time.

PCWorld[^]:

As far as 99.9 percent of the world population is concerned, Microsoft is a stodgy, old-guard technology company. Its bottom line is fully leveraged against PC operating systems and business software—hardly the building blocks of a future-thinking portfolio, right? But scratch that cold, conservative, pedestrian surface, and you’ll find a Microsoft that’s a veritable hotbed of cutting-edge innovation. Indeed, the company doesn't just loosen its purse strings when it comes to research and development. No, it practically throws money at really big thinkers to build a more wondrous, fantastical future.

Windows with C++[^]:

When starting a new project, do you ask yourself whether your program will be compute-bound or I/O-bound? You should. I’ve found that in most cases it’s either one or the other.... Given all of these different scenarios, how do you decide what threading capabilities your program requires and what concurrency building blocks are necessary or useful? Well, that’s a tough question to answer generally and something you’ll need to analyze as you approach a new project. It’s helpful, however, to understand the evolution of threading in Windows and C++ so you can make an informed decision based on the practical choices that are available.

nikic[^]:

One of the large new features in PHP 5.5 will be support for generators and coroutines. Generators are already sufficiently covered by the documentation and various other blog posts (like this one or this one. Coroutines on the other hand have received relatively little attention. The reason is that coroutines are both a lot more powerful and a lot harder to understand and explain. In this article I’d like to guide you through an implementation of a task scheduler using coroutines, so you can get a feeling for the stuff that they allow you to do.

Lucky's Notes[^]:

The trivially straightforward algorithm is actually good enough to solve the beginner and intermediate versions of the game a good percent of the time. Occasionally, if we’re lucky, it even manages to solve an advanced grid! When humans play minesweeper, we compete for the fastest possible time to solve a grid of minesweeper. So it doesn’t matter if we lose 20 games for every game we win: only the wins count. This is clearly a silly metric when we’re a robot that can click as fast as we want to. Instead, we’ll challenge ourselves with a more interesting metric: Win as many games as possible.

Josh Haberman[^]:

If you think about it, a JIT is not that different from a program that calls printf(), a JIT just so happens to emit machine code rather than a message like "Hello, World!" Sure, JITs like the JVM are highly complicated beasts, but that's because they are implementing a complicated platform and performing aggressive optimizations. If we work with something simpler, our program can be much simpler too.

Gamedevtuts+[^]:

The indie gamedev community is awesome: so willing to share tips, tricks, advice, and even detailed tutorials explaining important concepts. Here, I’ve rounded up a few dozen of my favourite examples from around the internet, covering coding, maths, game design, and being a game developer.

sellsbrothers.com[^]:

If you’re not familiar with it, TypeScript adds a lot of necessary features to JavaScript to make it suitable for building real apps, while still “compiling down” to JavaScript to maintain JS’s single biggest advantage: ubiquity. Further, TypeScript has tooling inside Visual Studio so that it works nicely with a wide variety of Windows projects, including Win8/JS projects. However, while Microsoft has made a nice Win8/TS sample available, there are currently no Visual Studio project templates for building my own apps. Luckily, it was easy enough to build some...

Wired.com[^]:

When Joe Woodland dreamed up the bar code in the late 1940s, it looked like a bull’s-eye — a series of concentric circles. But although Woodland went to work for IBM in the early ’50s and helped Big Blue push the UPC into the market, he sold his original bull’s eye patent to another company, and the code IBM settled on looked more like a rectangle — a series of short, parallel lines.... Laurer first realized the code could be construed as some sort of apocalyptic signpost while it was still under development in the early 1970s. His daughter happened to be studying the Book of Revelation, and he couldn’t help but notice that the code harbored a few 6′s — though not the 6′s alleged by the urban legend that’s still bouncing around the internet.

Rasmus Andersson[^]:

This might come as a surprise to readers not into computer programming, but professional and hobbyist programmers alike all use the same tools as we did 60 years ago — one-dimensional, sequential plain text. It’s like writing a single document in Word without using any formatting, with the goal of instructing a large symphony orchestra to perform a complex musical piece. That app you’re using could as well have been built in the 1950s, had we the same powerful hardware back then. We are thoughtlessly using Grandpa’s old toolbox to build a spaceship.