The Insider News

VisionMobile[^]:

Mozilla, the company behind Firefox and top-5 mobile operator Telefonica are co-developing a new mobile operating system. The project is codenamed Boot2Gecko by Mozilla and devices running the OS are dubbed “Open Web Devices” by Telefonica. The goal is a phone that relies entirely on web technology and where all applications, from the dialler to games, are developed with HTML5.

BBC[^]:

When it comes to cracking some of their field’s biggest issues, traditional science methods are not fully up to the task. Science is changing. In the age of the internet it is waking up the idea of people power: the combined forces of thousands of ordinary connected volunteers can help collect or crunch overwhelming masses of data.

What to Fix[^]:

Today I'm doing something most of you older programmers out there should do as well: I'm sitting down with my oldest son to talk about where all of the family's "digital inheritance" is.

Ars Technica[^]:

March 31 is World Backup Day, the day that the storage tech industry exhorts us all to back up our digital possessions and practice good data hygiene. But there's one thing that's just as important as backing up your data in the first place, or possibly more so: properly getting rid of your old backups when they're no longer useful.

Monday Note[^]:

Much has been written about RIM’s gloomy quarterly numbers. The attention is a testament—an apt word—to the place RIM once occupied. The trouble for RIM is simply stated: Too little too late, while the money runs out. If only the cure were as easily put.

Yasmine Mustafa[^]:

One of the recurring themes I’m seeing is technical founders building a product for themselves. I wish I would have been in their shoes. That is, until I find out they’re forging ahead without a marketing plan. My goal is to provide a methodology for building the framework of a marketing plan. It is geared towards those with a technical background although anyone can take advantage of this structure.

ZoomZum[^]:

If you're a .NET developer, you're probably intimately familiar with Visual Studio. But what else is out there to make you more productive and your code better? Here's a quick list of tools you might not know about.

mobiForge[^]:

People probably don't realise just how extensively server-side adaptation is used by the major internet brands in order to fine-tune the user experience for each platform. To help shine a light on this I'm going to look at the approaches that some major brands use in delivering their mobile web experiences. First up, it's Google.

Forbes[^]:

Source code control systems are somewhat abstruse pieces of software for managing code, so why should business people, especially mainstream ones, care? It’s because software culture evolves around tools that are hidden from public view, and as code becomes increasingly critical to everyday life, everybody, programmer or not, needs to develop an appreciation for how the world of software works.

Mitchell Hashimoto[^]:

Having spent a significant amount of time conceptualizing and growing Vagrant into a decently successful open source project, I’ve come away learning quite a bit. I haven’t seen many blog posts about open source maintainers commenting on their lessons learned, so I’d like to share them here. These are not only engineering lessons, but lessons involving being an open source maintainer, promoting your project, etc.

DVICE[^]:

The Tricorder Mark 1 is, for all practical purposes, nearly identical to the device that we see in Star Trek, with the possible exception of being unable to reliably distinguish a Klingon from a Romulan.

CircleID[^]:

One fine night in November 2011 I got an opportunity to get my hands dirty, working on a project for the FBI. They were planning to seize a bunch of computing assets in New York City that were being used as part of a criminal empire that we called "DNS Changer." This is our story.

Quantumaniac[^]:

For many Physicists throughout the ages - their beards are as remarkable as their brains. Here are just a few.

Clark's Tech Blog[^]:

Microsoft already has a much bigger presence with the Xbox and a lot of people use it as a media center. It already does a lot that the aTV does. Why Microsoft hasn’t gotten the media attention that Apple has despite unarguably being the leader in this space isn’t clear.

Macstories[^]:

High-profile iOS apps are drifting away from the forced skeuomorphism of user interfaces to embrace a more balanced approach between imitating real-life objects to achieve familiarity, and investing on all-digital designs and interfaces to benefit from the natural and intuitive interactions that iOS devices have made possible.

Simon Cooper[^]:

In all the hype around Windows 8 the past few months, a lot of developers have got the impression that .NET has been sidelined in Windows 8; C++ and COM is back in vogue, and HTML5 + JavaScript is the New Way of writing applications. You know .NET? It's yesterday's tech. Or is it?

Ode to Code[^]:

It's been my observation that the worst architectural decisions are made when technical people meet by themselves in a room with a whiteboard. I'm not saying the decisions are always bad, or wrong, but the plans and rules that come back to bite you consistently seem to incubate under these conditions.

Anchor Web Hosting[^]:

This will be a very tech-heavy post but if you’ve ever gone digging into kernelspace (as a coder, or someone on the ops side of the fence) we hope it’ll pique your interest. We’ll talk about the diagnostic process and introduce some of the new tools that made this possible.

William Edwards[^]:

The management pitch is that by getting programmers to follow some process rote you will get good, predictable results out. See, the thing is, the success of the coding-part of a project is dependent on the calibre of the engineers doing that coding and not the process they follow.

Fred Wu[^]:

In this day and age, I would have thought finding the right tool for the right job is common sense. Apparently not. Agile, among many other things, is not a silver bullet - it never was and it never will be. The key thing is to experiment and find what works for you, your team and your company.