The Insider News

Making the Complex Simple[^]:

I would venture to say that most software developers have some sort of belief that they are just a regular programmer, but there exists out there some super programmers who actually do the difficult algorithms that control caches on hard drives and index search results for Google. Now, of course there are programmers writing code that does all kinds of complex things that you and I don’t understand, but how different are those programmers from the rest of us?

The Economist[^]:

Are geniuses just born with their brains wired differently? Or do their early experiences fashion a richer set of neuronal interconnections that let them view the world through a sharper lens? An outfit in San Francisco called “tenXer” has begun testing a service that aims to help people boost their mental accomplishments by up to tenfold—hence its name. That has made your correspondent wonder what distinguishes the truly talented from the journeymen of any trade. And what, if anything, the rest can do to improve their more menial lot.

Phil Trelford's Array[^]:

Software is a product of humans, humans exhibit defects as do their software. Microsoft software is no different. You can report issues on the Microsoft Connect site or to Microsoft Support directly. My recommendation is that if possible you should do both.

Microsoft[^]:

If you are programming in Visual Basic 6.0 and planning to move to Visual Basic .NET, then the Visual Basic 6.0 Code Advisor is for you. The Code Advisor for Visual Basic 6 is an add-in used to review your code to ensure that it meets predetermined coding standards. The coding standards are based on best practices developed by Microsoft to produce robust and easy-to-maintain code.

Cosmin Negruseri[^]:

Meet in the middle (sometimes called split and merge) is a clever idea that uses caching to get efficient solutions. Much like divide et impera it splits the problem in two and then tries to merge the results. The benefit is that by using quite a bit of extra memory you can tackle problems of twice the size you could before. Now let's go through a few applications of the trick.

InformIT[^]:

Russ Olsen, author of "Eloquent Ruby" and Clojure developer, spins a tale of an archaic CAD program, politics, and progress that can be summed up with one simple mantra: "Stay the hell out of other people's code!"

Highly Scalable Blog[^]:

In this article I digested a number of MapReduce patterns and algorithms to give a systematic view of the different techniques that can be found on the web or scientific articles. Several practical case studies are also provided. All descriptions and code snippets use the standard Hadoop’s MapReduce model with Mappers, Reduces, Combiners, Partitioners, and sorting.

profserious[^]:

This is my attempt at distilling software engineering into 20 tweets (less than 140 characters). Not entirely sure that it is wholly satisfactory. Please try your own!

The Next Web[^]:

Twitter is great and, hopefully, it will grow into an even better product that makes us happy to use it. But the real-time web is the future, and It’s time we make sure that it isn’t dominated by a single option.

Joho the Blog[^]:

HyperCard was a groundbreaking, beautiful, and even thrilling app. Ahead of its time for sure. But the time it was ahead of seems to me to be not so much the Age of the Web as the Age of the App. I don’t know why there isn’t now an app development environment that gives us what HyperCard did. Apparently HyperCard is still ahead of its time.

Pixar[^]:

OpenSubdiv is a set of open source libraries that implement high performance subdivision surface (subdiv) evaluation on massively parallel CPU and GPU architectures. This is the same code that Pixar uses internally for animated film production. Our intent is to encourage high performance accurate subdiv drawing by giving away the “good stuff”.

Computerworld[^]:

Picture doing a remote software upgrade. Now picture doing it when the machine you're upgrading is a robotic rover sitting 350 million miles away, on the surface of Mars. That's what a team of programmers and engineers at NASA are dealing with as they get ready to download a new version of the flight software on the Mars rover Curiosity, which landed safely on the Red Planet earlier this week.

Ray Wenderlich[^]:

It might look silly to read through two tutorials to finally control a LED with your iPhone. Oh and it would be useless too. So why are you doing that? Well, an instructor at my university once said: “If you can control a LED, you can control ANYTHING”. And guess what, he’s right! Basically, turning a LED on or off is just like switching a Fan, TV, Dishwasher, or any other device. So for simplicity we’re gonna use a LED. But if you can get this working, then you can control anything.

Trotter Cashion[^]:

Logging is important. Very important. When your application breaks, the first place you usually check for a hint of what went wrong is the logs. Unfortunately, I have found that most log messages are absolutely terrible. They include snarky comments, lack any indication of what was going on, and sometimes do not even include the current time. Based on my experience, here's what a good log message looks like...