The Insider News

Hacker School[^]:

Abstraction layers are great tools for building things, but they can sometimes get in the way of learning. My goal in this post is to convince you that in order to rigorously understand C, we must also understand the assembly that our C compiler generates. I'll do this by showing you how to disassemble and read a simple program with GDB, and then we'll use GDB and our knowledge of assembly to understand how static local variables work in C.

Ars Technica[^]:

Inspired by the low-cost computing power of the Raspberry Pi, a team at the University of Southampton has used the ARM-based Linux computer-on-a-board as a building block for a low-cost supercomputer—racked and stacked using Lego blocks. And they’ve published a step-by-step guide for anyone interested in creating their own Raspberry Pi high-performance computing “bramble."

The Industry[^]:

Today Apple announced the iPhone 5, with a new thin design, larger screen, and faster processor. It wasn’t much of a surprise primarily due to all the leaked parts, but as with all of Apple’s products, it made a big splash. Here are some first impressions from the point of a designer and web developer.

TidBITS[^]:

Without some details about the 160 attacks on “critical infrastructure” in 2011, it’s impossible to evaluate whether the solution is stronger hardware, better training, or advanced deep-breathing relaxation techniques. Some Internet attacks are the equivalent of knocking on a door and trying the handle to see if it’s unlocked. These might be targeted against millions of computers in numeric sequence, and happen to include “critical infrastructure” only by accident.

Dave Bost[^]:

A common dream of most developers is to develop a game. Game development can be very intimidating to jump into straight away. The hardest decision is to determine what kind of game you’re going to create – what’s the backstory, who are the actors, what’s their purpose, what does success look like, and so on. One of the more popular casual game types and one not to intimidating for new game developers to jump into is the Tower Defense game genre.

Macdrifter[^]:

I'll skip the rumor mongering that lead to the NFC speculations and get straight to it. I'm glad Apple is not using NFC in the new iPhone. My iPhone already has one of the best data transmission options available, a retina display and a high resolution camera. NFC is solving the wrong problem. Here's the real problem: how do we communicate data a short distance as quick as possible with the least effort?

The Code Project[^]:

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews.

Jimmy Bogard's Blog[^]:

My first foray into Agile was with a product team back in 2004-2005. It was my first “real” job out of college, and my first experience with a death march. During the death march, I was struck on how bad the idea of death marching was. Working weekends, long hours etc. were a sign of failure not on the development team, but our a failure to plan, set expectations, and deliver frequently. This rather horrible experience pushed me to explore better options, leading me into Scrum and XP.

Channel 9[^]:

In partnership with the Visual Studio team, we are launching Code Snippets for Windows Store apps, a collection of around 60 IntelliSense Code Snippets for common Windows Store app programming tasks. The snippets are available for Visual Basic, C#, C++, and JavaScript developers. For example, if you don’t know how to copy a file in JavaScript or C++, just right-click, select Insert Snippet, select the code snippet, and it will automatically add the code to your Windows app.

Robot App Store[^]:

iRobot has published an API for Roomba - the Roomba SCI (Serial Command Interface). The idea is very simple: you need to transfer byte array to Roomba’s serial port.... Each byte holds a single command or a command-group. We will go deeper into that later on...