The Insider News

Henrik Warne's blog[^]:

All programs need some form of logging built in to them, so we can observe what it is doing. This is especially important when things go wrong. One of the differences between a great programmer and a bad programmer is that a great programmer adds logging and tools that make it easy to debug the program when things fail. When the program works as expected, there is often no difference in the quality of the logging. However, as soon as the program fails, or you get the wrong result, you can almost immediately tell the good programmers from the bad.

Making the Complex Simple[^]:

JavaScript is a bubble. Just like the housing bubble. Just like the .COM bubble. And just like any bubble, the JavaScript bubble is bound to pop. Sure, JavaScript is everywhere. It appears to be growing at a rapid pace. But I’m willing to bet that we are getting close to a complete reversal that will throw JavaScript down from its throne, shattering its JQuery scepter with it.

AllThingsD[^]:

When you think of mobile games, you probably think of titles like Angry Birds, Temple Run or Fruit Ninja — not the sort of micromanaging strategy games for which Sid Meier is best known. And yet the creator of the hit Civilization franchise and his company, Firaxis Games (owned by Take-Two Interactive), are moving more troops into mobile after testing the waters with ported games like Pirates! and Civilization Revolution. Rather than just producing, Meier himself was one of three programmers on a new mobile-first Firaxis game, Ace Patrol.

Honeywords Project[^]:

We suggest a simple method for improving the security of hashed passwords: the maintenance of additional honeywords (false passwords) associated with each user's account. An adversary who steals a file of hashed passwords and inverts the hash function cannot tell if he has found the password or a honeyword. The attempted use of a honeyword for login sets off an alarm. An auxiliary server (the honeychecker) can distinguish the user password from honeywords for the login routine, and will set off an alarm if a honeyword is submitted.

Smithsonian Magazine[^]:

Once upon a time, teachers lacked the tools to excite and engage pupils in engineering. And the technological know-how required to put together a juddering robot limited the audience to high-school and university students. That all changed in 1998 when Lego launched its first wave of programmable bots. By the second wave, in 2006, the programming language had become visual and kids could make bots do pretty much anything simply by stringing directives together on a computer. “Today a second grader can make her own wall-avoiding triceratops in 20 minutes,” says Chris Rogers, a professor of mechanical engineering at Tufts University.

Cross browser testing[^]:

Back in the year 1999 Microsoft released it's then brand new and up-to-date browser Internet Explorer 5. How much did happen in the last 14 years regarding web technologies and development? Would it still be possible to use this browser? Let's find out!

Business Insider[^]:

Bill Gates took a shot at the iPad while explaining Microsoft's rationale for the Surface this morning on CNBC. He was asked about the declining PC market. He said that tablets are growing in popularity, and it's "going to be harder and harder to distinguish products" that are PCs versus tablets.... He then said of people using iPad-like devices, "A lot of those users are frustrated, they can't type, they can't create documents, they don't have Office there."

CWE™ International in scope and free for public use, CWE provides a unified, measurable set of software weaknesses that is enabling more effective discussion, description, selection, and use of software security tools and services that can find these weaknesses in source code and operational systems as well as better understanding and management of software weaknesses related to architecture and design.

Ayende @ Rahien[^]:

If you are wondering about the binary format, that is what this post is all about. We actually start from the end. We have the last 48 bytes of the file are dedicated to the footer....

dansdata.com[^]:

Today, I will be discussing recent happy developments in the profitable and entertaining field of stealing other people's Internet passwords. This used to be quite annoying. Every now and then some idiot would leave ftp.someidiot.com/secret/passwords.txt just sitting there in plaintext, not the salted password hashes that they should have saved. But usually it wasn't easy to get the hashed passwords, and then it was unacceptably computationally expensive for us to brute-force our way through passwords of ever-increasing length until we found some that matched the hashes. Brute-force cracking is getting faster and faster, but if the brute-forcing time for an 80486 was "one googolplex years", then even if modern hardware can do it a million times as fast, you're still not appreciably closer to the target.

Frama-C news and ideas[^]:

This post is the first in a series on the difficult task of rounding a floating-point number to an integer. Laugh not! The easiest-looking questions can hide unforeseen difficulties, and the most widely accepted solutions can be wrong.

Simon Weber[^]:

I started using a Samsung 550 Chromebook as my on-the-go machine two semesters ago. It worked nicely for taking notes, but I remained a skeptic: how could I ever write code from a glorified web browser? Fast forward 6 months: today, I love hacking on my Chromebook, and I have no problems working offline. It took some effort to get everything set up, so I’ve put together my recommendations to get other folks up to speed.

Sam who?[^]:

You have an idea for a program. It’s the best program idea you’ve ever had so you quickly prototype something in C... A work of genius. You quickly compile and run it to make sure all is good... Boom! But wait… What has happened? How has it gone from being quite an understandable high level program into being something that your processor can understand and run. Let’s go through what’s happening step by step.

absorptions[^]:

As told in a previous post, I like to watch the RDS-TMC traffic messages every now and then, just for fun. Even though I've never had a car. Actually I haven't done it for years now, but thought I'd share with you the joy of solving the enigma. RDS-TMC is used in car navigators to inform the driver about traffic jams, roadworks and urgent stuff like that. It's being broadcast on a subcarrier of a public radio FM transmission. It's encrypted in many countries, including mine, so that it could be monetized by selling the encryption keys.

TUAW[^]:

The Jawbone UP fitness tracker is a lot more useful now that Jawbone has opened the API to third-party developers. One of the most exciting companies tapping into the UP platform is online automation tool, IFTTT. In the article below, I will talk a little bit about connecting your UP to IFTTT and then list some of my favorite recipes.

profserious[^]:

I read scientific biographies hopeful that I might understand how they achieved scientific greatness, in order obviously, that I might emulate it. The outcome is, inevitably, that I better appreciate just how exceptional the individuals are and how unlikely any strategy dependent upon emulation might be. Only one practical lesson shines through, the requirement for a sustained and unblinking focus on a challenge that is worthy of the effort that must be devoted to it. Scientific greatness is earned, but it is also chosen.