The Insider News

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

Crapware is in the news in a big way this week thanks to Oracle’s recent Java “security” update and a blog post by Long Zheng that exposes the economic incentives for software developers to bundle crapware installers. He also points out that respected Silicon Valley VCs are funding Crapware-installer InstallMonetizer.... One of the things coming out in all of this is that Microsoft, usually seen as one of the victims in the spread of crapware, is not completely innocent in this matter.

Web Dev .NET[^]:

You may have seen the buzz yesterday about the Critical Microsoft Security Hot-fix (MS13-008). The hot-fix applies to a security issue in Internet Explorer versions 6 through 8. Newer version of IE (9 and 10) are not in danger. You could apply the above hot-fix to your existing old version of Internet Explorer, but why? Why not go ahead and upgrade to IE9 or IE10? Not only will you get more features and a faster browser, but you will also be pushing the web forward.

Learning by Shipping[^]:

Moving beyond the gotcha blogs, there’s an actual reason for using technology products and services other than the ones you make (or happen to be made by the company where you work/ed). I think everyone knows that, even a thousand tweets later. The approach in many industries to downplay or even become hostile to the competition are well-documented and studied, and generally conclude that experiencing the competition is a good thing. Learning from the competition is not just required of all product development folks, but can also be somewhat of a skill worth honing. Let’s look at the ins and outs of using a competitive product.

Matt Might[^]:

Languages form the terrain of computing. Programming languages, protocol specifications, query languages, file formats, pattern languages, memory layouts, formal languages, config files, mark-up languages, formatting languages and meta-languages shape the way we compute. So, what shapes languages? Grammars do. Grammars are the language of languages. After reading this article, you will be able to identify and interpret all commonly used notation for grammars.

A Neighborhood of Infinity[^]:

Being compatible with Heisenberg uncertainty isn't enough for something to be realisable as a physical state. Is there a wavefunction that allows us to know the digits to the right of the decimal point as far as we want for both position and momentum measurements? Maybe surprisingly, the worlds of audio and graphics can help us answer this question.

Pythonic Perambulations[^]:

I [was] passing the time by poking around on the imgur gallery, and saw a couple animated gifs based on one of my all-time favorite games, Super Mario Bros. It got me wondering: could I use matplotlib’s animation tools to create these sorts of gifs in Python? Over a few beers at an SFO bar, I started to try to figure it out. To spoil the punchline a bit, I managed to do it... This animation was created entirely in Python and matplotlib, by scraping the image data directly from the Super Mario Bros. ROM. Below I’ll explain how I managed to do it.

Atomic Spin[^]:

After I got over how cool it was that this technique was going to be useful, I got uncomfortable. “There’s a giant space of programs that this computer can emit and consume that I have no way of ever understanding,” I thought. That’s cool, but it’s also scary. I made something that caused me to feel deeply insignificant. Programming became scary. The potential of the machine suddenly felt limitless.

Clef[^]:

Usernames and passwords are the de facto standard for accessing user accounts on the web, so it’s likely that if your users have accounts, that’s the way you have them sign in. Keeping up with best practices for handling passwords can be hard, but is important for your users safety. Here’s a quick list of the things you should be doing to secure your passwords today.

Internet Archive[^]:

Books related to the Atari line of computers, including the Atari 400, 800, ST, XL and XE. Titles include: Atari Calculator Manual, Your Atari Computer, Your Atari Computer XL Edition, Your Atari Comes Alive and Users Handbook to the Atari.

Lifehacker[^]:

We feature a lot of different DIY electronics projects on Lifehacker, but the barrier for entry might seem high at a glance. However, it's not nearly as difficult as it looks. Here's how to get started.

Bill Reiss' Development Blog[^]:

So back to my original frustration about Windows Phone and having a default non-WebKit browser. This is a real issue and I feel now that I recommended the wrong solution. The better solution is to add the capability to Windows Phone 8 to choose an alternative default browser. This would leave it open to the browser providers such as Google, Mozilla, Opera, etc. to provide a better option on the platform. Specifying a different default browser is something you can’t do on the iPhone, and Windows Phone could easily turn it into some positive publicity. After all, Windows 8 lets you pick your default browser, so why not enable this in Windows Phone.

DZone[^]:

Typography is one of the important aspect of the web designing . The User Interface / UX (User Experience) design is one of the challenging work in the design and development of the website. In this blog post , we will explore some of the Typography tools which will be useful for the Web Designers.

Ars Technica[^]:

Researchers have uncovered an ongoing, large-scale computer espionage network that's targeting hundreds of diplomatic, governmental, and scientific organizations in at least 39 countries, including the Russian Federation, Iran, and the United States. Operation Red October, as researchers from antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab have dubbed the highly coordinated campaign, has been active since 2007, raising the possibility it has already siphoned up hundreds of terabytes of sensitive information. It uses more than 1,000 distinct modules that have never been seen before to customize attack profiles for each victim.

Dream.In.Code[^]:

I came across this article discussing why PHP has a bad reputation. A lot of it came down to developers using poor practices. This excerpt: "Copying internet tutorial code and not reviewing it" struck me as particularly relevant, and something I think we see a lot of in the PHP forum. Granted for any language there are the low-quality and outdated tutorials out there, but PHP seems to have an abundance of this.