The Insider News

UX Movement[^]:

In today’s age of instant gratification, making users wait too long for your application to load is a user experience issue. If users get the feeling that your application loads too slow, they’ll grow impatient, and spend their time elsewhere. While there are technical things you can do to speed up load times, some feature-rich applications have no choice but to make users wait a while in order for the application to work properly. When you’ve optimized your application all you can and it still feels slow, there’s a way you can speed up your user’s sense of time to make them feel like your application loads faster than it really does.

Michael O.Church[^]:

One of the easiest ways for an epithet to lose its value is for it to become over-broad, which causes it to mean little more than “I don’t like this”. Case in point is the term, “spaghetti code”, which people often use interchangeably with “bad code”. The problem is that not all bad code is spaghetti code. Spaghetti code is an especially virulent but specific kind of bad code, and its particular badness is instructive in how we develop software.

Leif Singer's Blog[^]:

Previous research suggests that the publicity on GitHub that is making developers’ actions and interactions more visible might have an effect on how software development practices are communicated and how they diffuse in projects. My colleagues and I wondered: which influence does this have on testing practices? Does this create new challenges, and if so, how do developers cope with them? Which strategies do members of GitHub use to create a beneficial testing culture in their projects?

Edge[^]:

With Big Data we can now begin to actually look at the details of social interaction and how those play out, and are no longer limited to averages like market indices or election results. This is an astounding change. The ability to see the details of the market, of political revolutions, and to be able to predict and control them is definitely a case of Promethean fire—it could be used for good or for ill, and so Big data brings us to interesting times. We're going to end up reinventing what it means to have a human society.

GigaOm[^]:

It is hard to imagine that it has only been five years since the smartphone revolution started in earnest. The sensor driven modern marvels are not only redefining how we interact with the world, but they are also having unintended consequences. Like helping make cheaper robots.

Steve Olsen[^]:

The GIF graphics file format was invented by CompuServe in 1987. In the years since, a debate has been raging as to the correct way to pronounce "GIF": like "jif" as in the peanut butter, or with a hard 'g' as in "gift" as a majority of Mac users seem to prefer. With this page I intend to clear this up once and for all...

Coderoshi[^]:

An organization can actually be too smart for its own good... they can be too Egghead to talk to your average person. If your group is run by ten 160 IQ people, you're probably going to do amazing work. Sadly, most people probably won't ever know it. Just as the Dunning-Kruger Effect points out, it takes knowledge to recognize genuine knowledge in others.

Math Hombre[^]:

I've been asked multiple times this week about good iPad apps for math... so time to put together a list. I have not had an opportunity to use most of these with students yet, so I'm going on my impressions and recommendations. Many of these do have android versions.

TechHive[^]:

What could you do with $3500 and an old smartphone? You could toss the phone, take the cash, and buy yourself the next best smartphone. Or, with a bit of a DIY attitude, you could push the limits of this hefty piece of technology and use it to power something else. That's the initial idea of the PhoneSat project, a small satellite project run by a team of engineers at NASA's Ames Research Center. The PhoneSat team has built and developed two small satellite models powered by Android smartphones, with the rest of the body constructed mostly of things you could buy at your nearest hardware store.

Shawn Blanc[^]:

Mechanical keyboards are addictive. I think I have a problem. But I’m quitting now. Once you’ve acclimated to the tactical feedback and the clickety clack, typing on anything else doesn’t feel (or sound) the same. Earlier this year I spent a nerdy amount of time testing and comparing the three most popular Mechanical Keyboards for the Mac. Here's what I found.

ZDNet[^]:

Microsoft is in the midst of launching a host of new operating systems and tools this summer/fall. So what's a developer to choose to build apps and services for Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Windows Server 2012 and/or Windows Azure? There are familiar, legacy .NET tools and frameworks available, like Silverlight and Windows Presentation Foundation. There are newer and less familiar (to many Microsoft developers) options including XAML and HTML5/JavaScript. And on the server side, there's ASP.Net for building server-based Web applications. What's a developer supposed to use?

CloudFlare blog[^]:

At CloudFlare, an attack needs to get over about 5Gbps to set off alarms with our ops team. Even then, our automated network defenses usually stop attacks without the need of any manual intervention. When an attack gets up in the tens of Gigabits of data per second, our ops team starts monitoring the attack: applying filters and shifting traffic to ensure the attacked customer's site stays online and none of the rest of our network is affected.

Pat Shaughnessy[^]:

Blocks are one of the most commonly used and powerful features of Ruby. As you probably know, they allow you to pass a code snippet to iterators such as each, detect or inject. You can also write your own functions that call blocks for other reasons using the yield keyword. Ruby code containing blocks is often more succinct, elegant and expressive than the equivalent code would appear in older languages such as C or Java. However, don’t jump to the conclusion that blocks are a new idea! In fact, the computer science concept behind blocks, called “closures,” has its roots in the Lisp programming language, invented in 1958 by John McCarthy.