The Insider News

NewScientist[^]:

EVEN the most sophisticated electronic security can be defeated by forcing someone to reveal a password. But what if sensitive information could be stored in your brain in such a way that you couldn't consciously disclose it, no matter how hard you tried?

Robin Sloan[^]:

Robin Sloan went looking for some summer programming reading, and ended up creating this interactive book review about Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine." Code along with the video in the interactive JavaScript console to find out about Ullman's book, JavaScript and more.

StrathWeb[^]:

I have been reading the wishlist at Web API Codeplex repository recently, and noticed that one of the most popular requested features, is to add support for BSON (Binary JSON) media type (6th on the list). Of course all it takes to include BSON into your Web API is to simply write a media type formatter for it, and since JSON.NET already has great BSON support, it is actually quite easy.

nominolo's Blog[^]:

Many modern virtual machines include either a fast interpreter or a fast baseline compiler. A baseline compiler needs extra memory and is likely slower for code that is only executed once. An interpreter avoids this memory overhead and is very flexible. For example, it can quickly switch between execution modes (profiling, tracing, single-stepping, etc.). So what, then, is the state of the art of building fast interpreters?

kjbekkelund[^]:

I've seen many struggle when they first meet Backbone.js. In this blog post I will gradually refactor a bit of code from how I used to write JavaScript before, into proper Backbone.js code using models, collections, views and events. Hopefully this process will give you a firm understanding of the core abstractions in Backbone.js.

gift shop scientist[^]:

I recently blogged about achieving 82.5% accuracy predicting winners and losers of matchups in the 2012 Men’s College Basketball season using machine learning. I’ve only used data acquired prior to the predicted match, resulting in a valid representation of how the algorithm would be able to to predict this coming season. In this post I am actively attempting to ignore the inner workings of the algorithms used and instead focus on them as “black box” components. I speak to their use and their usefulness but not a lot about their actual mechanism. My personal interest lies in producing interesting (useful?) effects via manipulation of these algorithms and my goal is to help explain at a high level how I approached the problem.

IronSpread[^]:

I tend to keep track of data in Excel, and lately I've been using it as a CRM. I keep different sheets in order to answer different kinds of questions: Who asked about cell formatting? Who did I first talk to on our online chat? How many users do we have in Chicago? In theory, each sheet is synced with a master sheet containing all customer data. In practice, maintaining everything by hand was too time-consuming, and my data became scattered.

Clark's Tech Blog[^]:

The problem with so many portable devices... was that they required a stylus to work right. Often the stylus made touch into really more of a virtual-mouse. That’s just not the intuitive way to work. On an other level there’s something fundamentally wrong about this. Some tasks simply work better with a stylus and the limits of iOS make them annoyingly limited.

Building Windows 8[^]:

From high-end gaming rigs to light-weight, always-connected tablets, Windows 8 supports the broadest range of graphics hardware ever in a single operating system. We hope this post has helped explain some ways in which this work enables a whole new set of rich experiences.

The Endeavour[^]:

The 80-20 rule says that often 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. Applied to software, 80% of your customers may only use 20% of the features. So why not just develop that 20% and let the rest go?

O'Reilly Radar[^]:

A few weeks ago, Tom Slee published “Seeing Like a Geek,” a thoughtful article on the dark side of open data. He starts with the story of a Dalit community in India, whose land was transferred to a group of higher cast Mudaliars through bureaucratic manipulation under the guise of standardizing and digitizing property records.... That’s a serious problem. It’s sad to see oppression and property theft riding in under the guise of transparency and openness. But the issue isn’t open data, but how data is used.

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!