The Insider News

Quote: CNet[^]

If a tree fell in the forest, and no one noticed... the European Commission would impose a staggering fine -- and then congratulate itself for protecting consumers from falling trees. That's essentially what just happened: the Commission fined Microsoft $732 million for failing to show its "browser ballot" when users installed one of its Windows 7 updates.

Important Note on "SimCity"

Many customers are having issues connecting to the "SimCity" servers. EA is actively working to resolve these issues, but at this time we do not know when the issue will be fixed. Please visit https://help.ea.com/en/simcity/simcity for more information.

Future<bool> writeFile(String data,
                       File file) {
 return file.open(FileMode.WRITE)
   .then((io) => io.writeString(data))
   .then((io) => io.close())
   .then((io) => true)
   .catchError((error) => false);
}

John Papa[^]:

I’m taking my own advice here and responding to some frequently asked questions I receive on SPA on my blog. I get some of these a lot and it just makes sense that I aggregate them and share for discussion. The questions are all good and they cover a variety of experiences. Hopefully by sharing them, they will be of benefit to others.

raywenderlich.com[^]:

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been in love with role-playing games. There’s something so magical about an epic storyline set in a vast, intricate world. But when it comes to actually programming a RPG, it’s easy to get intimidated by that same epic complexity! Well, there’s some good news. There are now some killer tools, frameworks and tutorials to make this a lot easier than it used to be.

wekeroad.com[^]:

I've been teeth-deep in Client-side Javascript frameworks over the last 4 months for Tekpub. This month is Angular, last month was Ember's turn and I gave up. It's the first time I've given up - here's why.... You Keep Telling Me It's MVC... Yes, the concept of MVC has been contorted over the past decade as web frameworks have adopted it and massaged it to their own ends. What does this mean?

LispCast[^]:

I was trained in Java at University. The OOP matrix was firmly implanted in my thinking. I wanted to share some things that I have learned from Clojure that were certainly possible in Java but never became fundamental to my programming practice. Clojure certainly has learned a lot from Java. It might be cool if the learning went both ways. These are universal principles. In fact, these principles are actually well known in the OOP world. You probably already know them, so learning Clojure is not required (but it is recommended!).

Braintree[^]:

Working in Go was tons of fun; the language designers have put a lot of work into making the language a joy to use. We particularly appreciated the first-class focus the language puts on the parts of development that are uninteresting in theory but very important in practice, such as third-party library management, coding convention enforcement, and testing. With that said, we ran into a series of gotchas, irritants, and warts while developing our application, which I’ll elaborate on below. Ultimately, these problems were severe enough that they convinced us that we couldn't justify the gains we saw from using Go...

Made of Bugs[^]:

At Stripe, we rely heavily on ruby and EventMachine to power various internal and external services. Over the last several months, we’ve known that one such service suffered from a gradual memory leak, that would cause its memory usage to gradually balloon from a normal ~50MB to multiple gigabytes. It was easy enough to work around the leak by adding monitoring and restarting the process whenever memory usage grew too large, but we were determined to track down the root cause. Our exploration is a tour through a number of different debugging tools and techniques, so I thought I would share it here.

Sam says you should read this[^]:

When people complain about PHP being a horrible language, not fit for human consumption, they will often talk about how the features of their favourite language are far more refined; have been designed with elegance in mind; are consistent and secure. And you know what? They're right. But PHP is still a better tool. When people write very long blog posts about the horror that is PHP, which lead to double-clawed hammers being created, then they're right. But that double-clawed PHP hammer is still a better tool.

Secure Mac Programming[^]:

OK, I have to admit that I actually missed the party. Brad Cox first described his “Object-Oriented pre-compiler”, OOPC, in The January 1983 issue of ACM SIGPLAN Notices. "This describes the Object Oriented Pre-Compiler, OOPC, a language and a run-time library for producing C programs that operate by the run-time conventions of Smalltalk 80 in a UNIX environment. These languages offer Object Oriented Programming in which data, and the programs which may access it, are designed, built and maintained as inseparable units called objects." Notice that the abstract has to explain what OOP is: these were early days at least as far as the commercial software industry viewed objects.

AnandTech[^]:

Back in late January, I received the TECK for review, a keyboard that goes by the not-so-humble name of “Truly Ergonomic Computer Keyboard”, manufactured by a company that likewise uses the name Truly Ergonomic (hello name space collision). I’m sure other companies that make ergonomic keyboards might take exception to the name, but as far as I’m concerned that’s mostly marketing. The real question is how the TECK fares in day-to-day use, and whether it’s really a better keyboard for serious typists—and particularly typists like me that suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS)—compared to the other options.