The Insider News

The Glass Hammer[^]:

CodeProject is the world’s largest independent community of coders and developers. But in early 2012, Sean Ewington, Jeff Hadfield, Chris Maunder, and Terrence Dorsey recognized three related areas in which they believed CodeProject was not living up to its full potential: helping women embrace programming in greater numbers, enter the industry, and find support within it. To that end, Maunder and David Cunningham decided to create an Advisory Board for Women in Technology.

ExtremeTech[^]:

Unreal Engine 3, the game engine that runs fan favorites like Mass Effect, Gears of War, and Infinity Blade, has been ported to run inside a web browser without any plug-ins. Using JavaScript, specifically the asm.js sublanguage and Emscripten compiler, this engine can run on almost any modern web browser. While this is just a tech demo, it goes to show how the web browser is starting to become a completely valid native platform for games.

Viget[^]:

Overall, the challenges presented with C really forced me to think deeply about how I organized my code and interacted with the machine. Understanding that balance between bare-metal performance and human understandability definitely revealed the language's sweet spot. Even in an industry where older technologies are constantly rendered obsolete, that balance is the reason developers of major modern software projects continue to choose C for their implementation language.

ZDNet[^]:

With the recently leaked Windows Blue build out for the past few days, those downloading it are continuing to find new details as they dissect the code. While some of the early user-interface changes -- in some cases, making Windows Blue look and feel more like Windows Phone -- have been a big focus, the under-the-hood changes have gotten less coverage.... So what is MinKernel in this context? According to one of my sources, MinKernel is a minimal set of functionality that is shared across the different Windows kernels that run on x86, ARM, Windows Phone and Xbox. MinKernel is the one base-level implementation on top of which these platforms are built, the same way that BaseFS may be the base-level file system that is common across different platforms.

Hack a Day[^]:

There were just SO MANY horrible scenes that I started thinking about how to even categorize them.... The state of technology portrayal in movies is frankly abysmal. It is obvious that the only people who know less about tech than “hollywood” are the people making laws about it. So, lets take a look at this list and see what we ended up with.

AllThingsD[^]:

Something Facebook mobile this way comes. And depending on what you read, it’s a little different here and there. A proper Facebook phone. Or not a Facebook phone, but a very Facebook-y version of a phone. Whatever it is, we’re in agreement that it involves Facebook and a phone. But let’s rewind for a second: Who among us would actually want to buy a Facebook phone, much less use it as a primary device?

The Wirecutter[^]:

For most people, there’s no point in getting a smartwatch yet, as all the options have major kinks that need ironing out. Skip this generation of them. But if you absolutely must have one because you have nothing better to spend your money on (impossible) grab a Pebble. Amidst a sea of buggy devices, ugly design, concepts that never ship, and problematic pairing, it only gets the nod because it’s less than ideal, but workable, whereas much of the competition simply does not work, or is priced by crazy people.

mjg59[^]:

Secure Boot means different things to different people. I think the FSF's definition is a useful one - Secure Boot is any boot validation scheme in which ultimate control is in the hands of the owner of the device, while Restricted Boot is any boot validation scheme in which ultimate control is in the hands of a third party. What Microsoft require for x86 Windows 8 devices falls into the category of Secure Boot - assuming that OEMs conform to Microsoft's requirements, the user must be able to both disable Secure Boot entirely and also leave Secure Boot enabled, but with their own choice of trusted keys and binaries.

var sql = require('edge').func('sql.csx');

sql('select top 2 * from Products', function (error, result) {
  if (error) throw error;
  console.log(result);
});

CodeProject[^]:

In this installment we talk to Chris Pardo, a Senior Product Manager at Dun and Bradstreet.

The Old New Thing[^]:

The C language does not describe an actual computer. It describes a theoretical one. On this theoretical computer, it must be possible to do certain things, like generate the address of one item past the end of an array, and that address must compare greater than the address of any member of the array. But how the C language implementation chooses to map these theoretical operations to actual operations is at the discretion of the C language implementation.

Dr Dobb's[^]:

In effect, the optimizing allocator has added a performance breakpoint: The program's performance is sharply different for sizes larger than the threshold than it is for smaller sizes. My colleague argued that such performance breakpoints are evil, because when people who use the code learn about the breakpoints, they will change their own behavior to compensate for the breakpoints. Once they do that, the people who use their code will change their own behavior, and so on. The original performance breakpoint may well result in ripple effects that complicate entire systems. As a result, my colleague argued that it is more important to design systems so that their performance changes smoothly with input size than it is to make them run very quickly on particular input sizes.

Tinfoil Security[^]:

Sometimes, the state of your website’s security can be affected by resources and services outside your control. The topic of today? Browser extensions.

michellebu.com[^]:

Programming is hard. Don't ever feel bad because you aren't as good at 'just googling it' as the person next to you. Don't ever let hackathon snobs talk you out of creating the next Twitter for cats or Yelp for public washrooms. Even the dumbest ideas (like trying to make animated polygons disappear and reappear) will help you improve as a programmer. Learning to program is largely about learning to learn--and the best way to learn is to do. At the end of the day, being a competent programmar isn't about how many hackathons you win or how many novel ideas you can come up with--it's about execution, attention to detail, and relentless dedication and passion for building and breaking.

golang.org[^]:

Go was designed and developed to make working in this environment more productive. Besides its better-known aspects such as built-in concurrency and garbage collection, Go's design considerations include rigorous dependency management, the adaptability of software architecture as systems grow, and robustness across the boundaries between components. This article explains how these issues were addressed while building an efficient, compiled programming language that feels lightweight and pleasant. Examples and explanations will be taken from the real-world problems faced at Google.

Jonathan Sampson[^]:

I’m going to use Internet Explorer 10 as my primary browser for one week. That’s one week without browsing, tweeting, or listening to turntable in Chrome (current “Browser of Choice”). That’s one week deep inside the bowels of the browser that burned me, and so many of my peers, so badly over the last decade. One week in the heart of the beast. Why? Isn’t Internet Explorer supposed to be a thing of the past? A bad phase in the history of the web that we’re slowly recovering from?