The Insider News

Ardalis[^]:

My opinions on comments in software code have evolved with my experience. When I was a teenager first learning to program for real, I rarely used comments unless the code was for an assignment, in which case it was a forced exercise every bit as much as teachers’ requests to “show your work” added verbosity to my math and science problems’ solutions. Of course, the programs themselves were quite simple, and the languages used (BASIC, Pascal) didn’t really support OOP (not that I knew what that was). And it was important, then, to be able to express the intent of the code in English, if only so the instructor knew what was being attempted. It wasn’t uncommon to receive partial credit for comments describing the approach one would take, not having had enough time to actually write the code itself.

Cello[^]:

The high level stucture of Cello projects is inspired by Haskell, while the syntax and semantics are inspired by Python and Obj-C. Cello isn't about Object Orientation in C, but I hope that with Cello I've turned C into something of a dynamic and powerful functional language which it may have once been. Although the syntax is pleasant, Cello isn't a library for beginners. It is for C power users, as manual memory management doesn't play nicely with many higher-order concepts. Most of all Cello is just a fun experiment to see what C would look like when Hacked to its limits.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us[^]:

My first breakout session at the SELA Developer Practice covered the most common attacks against web applications and how to defend against these attacks. When planning this talk, I knew 60 minutes are hardly enough to cover all common vulnerabilities -- especially if I wanted to show any demos -- so I decided to focus on the three most prevalent vulnerability types, according to the OWASP Top 10: Injection (command injection and SQL injection), Broken authentication or session management and Cross-site scripting (and CSRF as a bonus).

TildeHash[^]:

Firefox 20.0 -- and a couple earlier versions I think -- has a nifty little feature of its "Inspector" tool that allows you to view HTML elements as 3D objects. This lets you to graphically see the DOM structure and how elements lay against one another. As soon as the feature appeared I knew what I wanted to do with it, I wanted to use it for something it wasn't intended for: 3D Modeling.

David Rönnqvist[^]:

SceneKit is a high level 3D framework for Mountain Lion1 that was introduced almost a year ago at WWDC 12. It is all Objective-C and integrates with other UI frameworks like Cocoa and Core Animation. This means that you can use normal NSColors, NSImages and CATransform3Ds to configure your 3D scene. It also means that you can easily animate property changes, like for example position or transform, using a regular CAAnimations and addAnimation:forKey:. Sounds amazing? It is.

Communications of the ACM[^]:

Systems that respond to user actions quickly (within 100ms) feel more fluid and natural to users than those that take longer. Improvements in Internet connectivity and the rise of warehouse-scale computing systems2 have enabled Web services that provide fluid responsiveness while consulting multi-terabyte datasets spanning thousands of servers; for example, the Google search system updates query results interactively as the user types, predicting the most likely query based on the prefix typed so far, performing the search and showing the results within a few tens of milliseconds. Emerging augmented-reality devices (such as the Google Glass prototype7) will need associated Web services with even greater responsiveness in order to guarantee seamless interactivity.

MIT Technology Review[^]:

One of the dreams for security experts is the creation of a quantum internet that allows perfectly secure communication based on the powerful laws of quantum mechanics. The basic idea here is that the act of measuring a quantum object, such as a photon, always changes it. So any attempt to eavesdrop on a quantum message cannot fail to leave telltale signs of snooping that the receiver can detect. That allows anybody to send a “one-time pad” over a quantum network which can then be used for secure communication using conventional classical communication.

Medium[^]:

Gender equality is still a major issue in the technology industry, but 50 years ago one British company was blazing trails.... The company, originally called Freelance Programmers, was founded in the early 1960s by Stephanie Shirley, a German who had been evacuated to Britain — along with many fellow Jewish children — as part of the kindertransport shortly before the Second World War.

ReadWrite[^]:

Worried about your longevity as a worker in the fast-moving tech industry? What you need is some inspiration from John Sloan. Who's John Sloan? He's the man pictured in a photo I used in a recent post on 10 Technology Skills That Will No Longer Help You Get A Job. (See that photo below - or on the iPad in the photo above.) While Sloan may look like a symbol of outdated technology in the older photo, he's actually the polar opposite.

TIME.com[^]:

I may maintain that the fact that Microsoft has sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses in six months doesn’t mean much. But that doesn’t mean that Windows sales figures aren’t interesting. In fact, Microsoft’s news moved me to rummage around in Google Books, Microsoft’s press site and elsewhere for past sales data for various major editions of Windows dating back to version 1.0, which debuted in November 1985.