The Insider News

Matt Gemmell[^]:

We forget that physical objects are also just specific embodiments – or presentations – of their content and function. A paperback book and an ebook file are two embodiments of the text they each contain; the ebook isn’t descended from the paperback. They’re siblings, from different media spheres, one of which happens to have been invented more recently. The biggest intellectual stumbling-block we’re facing is the fallacy that just because physical embodiments came first, they’re also somehow canonical.

Haacked![^]:

In some recent talks I make a reference to Conway’s Law named after Melvin Conway (not to be confused with British Mathematician John Horton Conway famous for Conway’s Game of Life nor to be confused with Conway Twitty) which states: Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure. Many interpret this as a cynical jibe at software management dysfunction. But this was not Melvin’s intent. At least it wasn’t his only intent.

Visual F# Team Blog[^]:

Through Jack Pappas, the F# Software Foundation (the F# community group also known as fsharp.org) has recently made F# more readily available on FreeBSD. Some details below, taken from the discussion on the F# Open Source Google Group....

End Your If[^]:

Entity framework is a great ORM provided by Microsoft. There are a ton of examples of how to get up and running with it really quickly. The only problem with all of them, is the get you off on the wrong foot. In all of the EF example guides, the DbContext class is typically deeply embedded into the core of your code. This of course is great for Entity framework because the effort to change will be next to impossible – speaking from experience of course here. Instead, by making some subtle changes we can integrate Entity framework in a separate layer in case at some later date you wish to replace it.

MIT Technology Review[^]:

You probably haven’t heard of HD Moore, but up to a few weeks ago every Internet device in the world, perhaps including some in your own home, was contacted roughly three times a day by a stack of computers that sit overheating his spare room. “I have a lot of cooling equipment to make sure my house doesn’t catch on fire,” says Moore, who leads research at computer security company Rapid7. In February last year he decided to carry out a personal census of every device on the Internet as a hobby. “This is not my day job; it’s what I do for fun,” he says.

The Atlantic[^]:

The forms the bubbles take have always been a little bit mysterious -- not only to amateur scientists, but to professional ones, as well. While single soap bubbles are fairly straightforward things -- gas, trapped in liquids -- much more complex are the single bubbles that fuse together into composite structures of trapped air: foams. And when bubbles become foams -- when they glom onto each other to create the weird and wobbly little wonders... -- they behave differently than single bubbles do.... The forces behind all that wobbling and wonder-making, however, are different from the forces that determine when each bubble pops -- making it notoriously difficult to predict bubble behavior.

CBS News[^]:

We've seen plenty of Bill Gates on television, but we'd never seen him get emotional before. It was a striking, yet subtle moment in Gates' 60 Minutes interview this week when Charlie Rose asked him about his longtime business rival, the late Steve Jobs. Gates grew emotional as he recalled visiting Jobs just before his death. The billionaire welled up as he described their last conversation, which he described as "forward-looking."

Whoops by Jonathan Libov[^]:

What I lack for design skills, I make up for in being good at organizing information, keeping up with trends, and putting in effort. Although it takes me five hours to do what a pro designer can do in one, this competence has helped me at work and in my personal projects, as I don't need to rely on finding designers to make my work at least passable. There's also an external circumstance why I've been able to "pull it off" in recent years: the flat design trend. Flat design entails austerity: reducing the UI to eye-catching levels of minimalism. More practically, it entails using fewer features and techniques in Photoshop.

Mother Jones[^]:

In Kevin Drum's latest feature, he imagines a bleak future where robots begin taking all of our jobs. Though he predicts this will happen about three decades from now, the concept obviously isn't new. The word "robot" first appeared in a 1920s Czech play (see below), which concludes with human destruction. The plot line started to seem more realistic when robots began performing complex industrial tasks. By 1961, a giant robot arm called Unimate took a welding job on the General Motors factory floor. Throughout the last century, robots—both imaginary and real—have fascinated us with their skills, quirks, and eerie human-like qualities. The timeline below highlights some of the most memorable machine moments and personalities.

CodeProject.tv[^]:

Make an instructional video about Android development and upload it to CodeProject.TV for a chance to win a free, full-access pass to AnDevCon in Boston (worth $1,795).

Dream.In.Code[^]:

Bezier Curves are just equations which act on a series of points to define the look of a curve. As a result they can be scaled and modified easily without losing their integrity or fine edge. However, since they are equations that means we also have to look at some math.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

There are few things sadder than the software that ships with your car's in dash computer. it's 2012 and we have hybrids that can regenerate power from inertia but the car manufacturers haven't figured out that we just want the in-dash car screen to be powered by our smartphone.

Scott Smith[^]:

ScriptCS allows you to use C# as a scripting language. It harnesses the power of Roslyn and NuGet to enable you to write .NET applications with your favorite editor.... ScriptCS also offers its own REPL providing an interactive experience. You can install nuget packages, type some code, and have it execute instantly! As of writing this post, this functionality is in the dev branch and not yet available on the master branch.

Forecast Blog[^]:

Removing noise from radar images has turned out to be one of the biggest technical challenges we’ve faced while developing Dark Sky’s forecasting system. We generate our short-term rain predictions using data from the National Weather Service’s network of 150 NEXRAD radar stations, spread across the US. This data comes in as a raw data format, and the very first thing we do after grabbing it is convert it to images. The problem is that the data is filled with noise — false data that looks like rain, but is really something else.

Brain Dump[^]:

There's a secret for Perl being so good at code golf, and this secret is clever use of regexp. The regexps from Posix are just finite automata, but the Perl engine is much more powerful than that. Naturally, I became tempted to check what are the computational limits of Perl's regexp. For example, can we do arithmetic with regexps? After thinking I while, I concluded that yes, we can do arithmetic with regexps!

Andrew Cooke: C[omp]ute[^]:

Python is about to get an Enum. And it's sad. It's not awful. It just fails to do anything particularly well - it's an awkward compromise whose only real achievement is not doing anything new.

Nettuts+[^]:

A bright star in the JavaScript community, Addy Osmani has skyrocketed to prominence not only for his fabulous JavaScript articles and open source contributions but for also being one of the friendliest and approachable developers around. His blog is a treasture trove of front-end knowledge and well-worth the visit. In this post, we'll chat with Addy about how he got his feet wet in JS and bring up some tough topics relating to his work in developer relations at Google.

StraussBlog[^]:

Spear phising is an extremely potent hacking vector that combines social engineering with phishing. Basically, an attacker tries to learn enough about a specific victim to inform the design of a fake email that the victim is more likely to think is legitimate and thus open and engage with.... Over the last several months, I have been the target of what might be a new, more scalable, approach to spear phishing. I have been receiving phishing emails that are sent using the names of people I know but not their email addresses...