The Insider News

Insightful Logic[^]:

At the end of a CMS collection its possible for some objects to not have been deleted - this is called Floating Garbage. This happens when objects become de-referenced since the initial mark. The concurrent preclean and the remark phase ensure that all live objects are marked by looking at objects which have been created, mutated or promoted. If an object has become dereferenced between the initial mark and the remark phase then it would require a complete retrace of the entire object graph in order to find all dead objects. This is obviously very expensive, and the remark phase must be kept short since its a pausing phase. This isn't necessarily a problem for users of CMS since the next run of the CMS collector will clean up this garbage.

Steamclock Software[^]:

A few month back, Apple quietly slipped a very nice Objective-C to Javascript bridge into WebKit.... This new API supports straightforward embedding of the JavaScriptCore interpreter into native Objective-C projects, including reading and writing variables and object members with appropriate type coercion, calling methods on JavaScript objects, and directly binding Objective-C objects into JavaScript. It seems likely that this API is going to become public in Mac OS X 10.9 (where JavaScriptCore is already a public framework), and it might be a hint of an eventual public API on iOS. Either way, a new option for building hybrid JavaScript apps is here.

azakai[^]:

It's often said that the web needs a bytecode.... basically the point is that people want to use various languages on the web, and they want those languages to run fast. Bytecode VMs have been very popular since Java in the 90's, and they show that multiple languages can run in a single VM while maintaining good performance, so asking for a bytecode for the web seems to make sense at first glance.

Transcending Frontiers[^]:

Writing a good README is easy. You just need to know what information is required for developers to use and understand the application. Here’s some Rails-centric information I include in the READMEs I write for The Frontier Group...

Wired.com[^]:

Google has product lines on three platforms: web, mobile, and desktop. If you’re heavily invested in its web apps, Android makes a lot of sense. Its integration with your Google account helps it do amazing things. Google Now, for example, combines your location with the wealth of data the company knows about you to, say, automatically pop up your boarding pass at the airport. Or display directions to your hotel when you land. It would be creepy were it not so helpful. (OK, maybe it is a little creepy.) Google needs to make that same impression with Chrome. Instead, there’s a divide between its desktop efforts and other aspects of the business. Two different operating systems, two different experiences.

Electronic Frontier Foundation[^]:

The debate to nail down the long overdue Do Not Track (DNT) standard continued at the W3C Tracking Protection Working Group face-to-face meeting in Sunnyvale last week. Despite a less hostile tone in the room, there seemed to be no clear path forward towards agreement regarding the core issue of ensuring that the standard provides users with enough privacy protection to justify its existence. With the group set to begin winding down in July, there is a lot of uncertainty about whether a consensus standard can be reached with such a short time frame, and if no consensus standard emerges, what will happen next.

WekeRoad[^]:

There's a thought in neuroscience/psychological circles that words are much more than sounds that represent things: they are the abstraction of our higher brain function. Words are language, code is language. Restricting yourself to one or two languages is limiting your cognitive abilities.

Code Arcana[^]:

Format string vulnerabilities are a pretty silly class of bug that take advantage of an easily avoidable programmer error. If the programmer passes an attacker-controlled buffer as the argument to a printf (or any of the related functions, including sprintf, fprintf, etc), the attacker can perform writes to arbitrary memory addresses.

Entrepreneurial Seduction[^]:

The problem with talking about functionality not in the current release sets expectations and distracts from marketing what’s already wonderful about what you’re selling. All you’re doing is diminishing the product you’re selling. You are also making a promise to your customers that you may need to break down the road if priorities change (or Apple implements new OS features that force your hand).

Wired.com[^]:

In the dark old days of the late 1990s and early 2000s, debates would rage about whether open source software is as good as proprietary software. And it was all a matter of opinion. Then, in 2006, the Department of Homeland Security partnered with a software code analysis company called Coverity to examine open source code for security vulnerabilities and software defects. Each year since, Coverity has published a report on the quality of open source code.... But the latest report, published on Wednesday, found something new: the code quality of open source projects tends to suffer when they surpass 1 million lines of code, whereas proprietary code bases continue improve when they pass that mark.