The Insider News

Nettuts+[^]:

Have you ever taken a look at the list of functions available in PHP? I just counted 5025 on the PHP quick reference page. Granted, it depends on what extensions you have enabled, but still: that’s one heap of functions! While I can’t show you every one of them, if you’re new to the language, I’ll introduce you to seven really handy ones in this quick tip!

fay-lang.org[^]:

JavaScript sucks: The depths to which JavaScript sucks is well-documented and well-understood. We need JavaScript: Using it for what it is good for, i.e. providing a platform for browser development, but not using the language per se, is therefore desirable, and many are working to achieve this, in varying forms. There are various ways to do it, but we ought to opt for compiling an existing language, Haskell, to JavaScript, because we do not have time to learn or teach other people a new language, garner a new library set and a new type checker and all that Haskell implementations provide.

Dr Dobb's[^]:

The advent of the many-core era is not going to push developers to write more parallel code. That hasn't happened as we've gone from 1- to 2- to 4- to 8-core processors, has it? Writing parallel code is not the problem. So, let's stop trying to fix it.

Jimmy Bogard[^]:

One of the mistakes I see people make (and have made myself) is assuming that you must choose exactly one ORM strategy for an entire database/application/system. It’s simply not the case. You can (and should) tailor your ORM strategy to your use case, and make sure you’re picking the right tool (or feature of the tool) for the job.

Technology Review[^]:

Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have devised a framework for running large-scale computations for tasks such as social network or Web search analysis efficiently on a single personal computer. The new software, called GraphChi, exploits the capacious hard drives that are becoming ever more common in personal computers. A graph would normally be stored in temporary memory (RAM) for analysis. With GraphChi, the hard drive performs this task instead.

Hello, Savants![^]:

First of all we put our computers away. The tools to become a programmer are paper, pens, tape, candy, ping-pong balls, wooden boxes, cups and other common objects. We start from 0, so we have to tell some stories about numbers, and how influenced by your knowledge of numbers. Erase all you know, start learning to count and move on, through short stories, anecdotes, parallels, trial and error.

The Atlantic[^]:

"One small step for a man," would not be the iconic line it is today if it hadn't been captured on video, for millions of Earthlings to watch as the first human set foot on the moon. Shooting live video on moon was "crucial for credibility of the mission," but posed a serious logistical challenge. Westinghouse engineer Stan Lebar, who was the program manager of the Apollo TV Lunar Camera project, was tasked with developing energy-efficient cameras that would withstand temperatures of plus or minus 250 degrees.

DesignSpark[^]:

The GA144 from GreenArrays is a highly novel 144 core processor that combines high performance with low power consumption. This post covers initial experiences with breadboarding the GA144 and using the Forth IDE to drive its I/O.

Ars Technica[^]:

Enyo was originally the official development framework of webOS, the platform that HP obtained in its 2010 acquisition of Palm and later destroyed during Leo Apotheker’s rein of imbecility. Meg Whitman, who replaced Apotheker as CEO, decided to salvage the remaining value of webOS by opening the source code and building a community around the software.