The Insider News

Microcontroller Central[^]:

So you just finished your most recent Arduino project and are hungry to build something new and impressive. Feeling confined by the Arduino's limited environment, peripherals, and power, you begin looking around for other options, but there are too many choices. There are microcontrollers from dozens of vendors in eight-, 16-, and 32-bit flavors, each requiring its own compilers and programmers, which could add up to a fortune. Is there no cheap and viable alternative for the little blue board that has stolen all our hearts? Enter the ARM Cortex M series of 32-bit microcontrollers...

cbloom rants[^]:

One of the great tragedies of modern technical writing is that it has gotten so standard and boring. There is absolutely no reason for it. It does not make it clearer or easier to read, in fact it makes it worse in every way - less clear, less fun, less human. If you read actual great technical writing, it has humanity and humor.

JLOUIS Ramblings[^]:

The operating system is VxWorks. This is a classic microkernel. A modest guess is that the kernel is less than 10 Kilolines of code and is quite battle tested. In other words, this kernel is near bug free. The key here is isolation. We isolate different parts of the rover. There are certain subsystems which are outright crucial to the survival of the rover, whereas a scientific instrument is merely there for observation. Hence we can apply a nice fact, namely that only parts of our 2.5 million lines of code needs to be deeply protected against error. There will some parts which we can survive without.

Matthew D. Fuller[^]:

While there's overwhelming similarity between the operating systems in most cases, there are also a lot of differences. As you probe more into the differences, you find that they emerge from deep-seated disagreements. Some are disagreements over development methodology, some over deployment and usage, some about what's important, some about who's important, and some about which flavor of ice cream is superior. Just comparing the surface differences doesn't tell you anything; it's the deeper differences that both explain and justify why each group does things the way they do.

Lifehacker[^]:

The keyboard you think is the best will depend heavily on what you use it for. Whether you're gaming and need programmable keys, you're a productivity ninja who also needs programmable keys, you listen to music while working and want media keys, or you just like a trusty long-lasting keyboard that feels good and doesn't take up space, you probably have a suggestion. Well, we asked for them, and close to 600 nominations later, you told us what you thought. Unfortunately, we only have room for the top five...

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.