The Insider News

ploeh blog[^]:

What's my beef with productivity tools? It's much deeper than a dislike for any particular tool. Charles Petzold already described his concern about Visual Studio in 2005 in a great talk titled Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?. It's a long read, but definitely worth your while. You should go read it now. In case you didn't want to take the time to read that article (but then: you're already reading this lengthy article), here's the gist of it: Via IntelliSense, code generation, Wizards and drag and drop, Visual Studio assists us, but it also pushes us towards writing (or not writing) code in a particular way. It railroads us. Does it make us more productive? I don't even know how to measure developer productivity, so I can't answer that. Do we learn while coding like that? Not much, I'd say.

IEEE Spectrum[^]:

Maybe it was this pay phone hack that caused Bells to ring in Barclay’s brain when he spotted the article in the Bell System Technical Journal. The article laid bare the technical inner workings of AT&T’s long-distance telephone network with clarity, completeness, and detail. It was all there: how the long-distance switching machines sang to each other with single-frequency (SF) and multifrequency (MF) tones, how 2600 hertz was used to indicate whether a telephone had answered, what the frequencies were of the tones that made up the MF digits, how overseas calls were made—it even included simplified schematic diagrams for the electrical circuits necessary to generate the tones used to control the network. Nothing was hidden. By the time Barclay finished reading it, the vulnerability in AT&T’s network had crystallized in his mind...

Building Wanelo[^]:

By vertical sharding we mean a process of increasing application scalability by separating out some number of tables from the main database, into a dedicated database instance to spread both read and write load. Vertical sharding is often contrasted with “horizontal” sharding, where higher scalability is achieved by adding servers with identical schema to host a slice of the available data. Horizontal sharding is generally a great long-term solution if the architecture supports it, but vertical sharding can often be done quicker and can buy you some time to implement a longer-term redesign.

mersenne.org[^]:

On January 25th at 23:30:26 UTC, the largest known prime number, 2^57,885,161-1, was discovered on Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) volunteer Curtis Cooper's computer. The new prime number, 2 multiplied by itself 57,885,161 times, less one, has 17,425,170 digits. With 360,000 CPUs peaking at 150 trillion calculations per second, 17th-year GIMPS is the longest continuously-running global "grassroots supercomputing" project in Internet history. Dr. Cooper is a professor at the University of Central Missouri. This is the third record prime for Dr. Cooper and his University.

All this[^]:

I’ve been doing a lot of calculations in both SI and US Customary Units recently. Normally, I can do the conversions at the end of a set of calculations, and the venerable units program works just fine for me. But in my current project, I need to show intermediate results in both sets of units and there’s just too much busy work in going back and forth between IPython, which I’m using as my calculator, and units. After a bit of hunting, I found the Python quantities module—it’s a bit more cumbersome than units if you’re just doing a few conversions, but it’s much better if you’re doing a long series of calculations.

xkcd what if?[^]:

If you want to transfer a few hundred gigabytes of data, it’s generally faster to FedEx a hard drive than to send the files over the internet. This isn’t a new idea—it’s often dubbed SneakerNet—and it’s how Google transfers large amounts of data internally. But will it always be faster?

I, Cringely[^]:

We stand today near the beginning of the post-PC era. Tablets and smart phones are replacing desktops and notebooks. Clouds are replacing clusters. We’re more dependent than ever on big computer rooms only this time we not only don’t own them, we don’t even know where they are. Three years from now we’ll barely recognize the computing landscape that was built on personal computers. So if we’re going to keep an accurate chronicle of that era, we’d better get to work right now, before we forget how it really happened. Oddly enough, I predicted all of this almost 25 years ago as you’ll see if you choose to share this journey and read on...

Volatile and Decentralized[^]:

Working on mobile systems at Google gives me some insight into what the hard open problems are in this space. Sometimes I am asked by academic researchers what I think these problems are and what they should be working on. I've got a growing list of projects I'd really like to see the academic community try to tackle. This is not to say that Google isn't working on some of these things, but academics have fewer constraints and might be able to come up with some radically new ideas.

Medium[^]:

Starting in May 2000 I was a member of a small team of engineers, game designers and artists working outside St. Louis, MO on a project for Sony Online Entertainment. Together we made Planetside, one of the only massively multiplayer first person shooters ever made. This is one of our stories.

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

Just some quick commentary on Dell going private and Microsoft’s participation in that process. Let me start with something that should be obvious even if it isn’t. There are personal relationships here that exist just about nowhere else in the PC ecosystem. Where else are the leaders who created the PC industry still involved with the companies they created? Michael Dell and Bill Gates (and Steve Ballmer) are the only ones left standing....

Troy Hunt[^]:

A few months back there was a bunch of news around the FTC cracking down on these scams. Problem is, the FTC has about zero jurisdiction in India where the scams are originating from! They also have zero jurisdiction in anywhere that isn’t America so the effectiveness of the “crack down” is unlikely to make much difference. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that once again, this evening I enjoyed the company of a couple of gentlemen willing to help me out with my PC.

InfoWorld[^]:

I don't have an action plan or any available magic that could restore Perl to its former glory. In fact, I don't think that's possible. However, Perl needs to become more attractive to younger developers and reach out to those who've drifted to other pastures. For the first time ever, Perl needs to figure out how to sell itself. I was hoping way back in 2010 that an official release of Perl 6 might prime the pump for that occurrence. Obviously, that hasn't happened.

8th Light[^]:

If you've ever worked on a software development project under a time crunch, then you may have heard the phrase "mythical man month." This phrase will often get uttered by a well-read team member when presented with a business stakeholder who wants to throw more bodies at the project to make it go faster. As often as the concept comes up, it never really lives beyond my under-the-breath mutterings. I tend not to share it with clients. Because how do you explain the “mythical man month” to Mr. CEO In A Hurry?

Helper Code[^]:

After reading Jon Skeet’s excellent C# in Depth - again (3rd edition - to be published soon) I’ve decide to try and actually read the C# language specification… Being a sensible kind of guy I’ve decided to purchase the annotated version which only cover topics up to .NET 4 – but has priceless comments from several C# gurus. After I’ve read a few pages I was amazed to learn that a few things I knew to be true were completely wrong and so I’ve decided to write a list of new things I’ve learnt while reading this book.