The Insider News

Two Ideas[^]:

The existence of Unix Beards is exceptionally well-documented, from Dilbert to Fortune, with a notable appearance in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon. But even the author of In the Beginning was the Command Line doesn't seem to note that the Unix beard is really an extension of the philosopher's beard, and the academic's beard.

MessageAnalyzer[^]:

Microsoft Message Analyzer has been released to the public. As you might guess from the name, Message Analyzer is much more than a network sniffer or packet tracing tool. Here's what it can do...

Cuddletech[^]:

Up until about 30 days ago my primary workstation ran some variety of Solaris for nearly 10 years, starting with Solaris 9 when X86 became viable on X86, then OpenSolaris and the various Solaris Express releases and finally Solaris 11 Beta. It was one month ago today that I finally re-installed it with Ubuntu, returning me to Linux officially. Times are a’ changin’… so I thought I’d share the tale of my long experience and the events that brought me back to Linux on the desktop.

AllThingsD[^]:

With last Wednesday’s Apple iPhone 5 unveiling, and the recent Nokia Lumia launch, mobile is on top of the media agenda. But as the screen size and connector stories die down, the question of “when will my mobile phone become my wallet?” rises up once again. I’ve read at least a dozen stories about the NFC-less iPhone 5 in the past few days, and my question remains, who cares?

louisgray.com[^]:

First they came for our floppy drives. Then, they came for our CDs and our DVD drives. It won't be too long until the concept of a hard drive, or any local storage, beyond that needed for temporary offline use, is itself antiquated. After decades of dramatically increasing PC hard disks, from megabytes to terabytes, saving local data is more likely to put you at risk of loss, relative to remote backup, than it is to keep your data safe, helped along by many trends pushing toward cloud storage and applications.

Stack Exchange[^]:

Ask Patents is a new Stack Exchange site launching today that allows anyone to participate in the patent examination process. It’s a collaborative effort, supported by Stack Exchange, the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the Google Patent Search team. It’s very exciting, because it is opening up a process that has been conducted behind closed doors for over 200 years. Our hope is that Ask Patents will reduce the number of patents mistakenly granted for obvious, unoriginal non-inventions, especially around software, a field that is near and dear to us.

The Next Web[^]:

On Wednesday, Sophos antivirus products did something very wrong: they started detecting false positives. The company has since fixed the issue, but only on Thursday did it become clear what the fiasco was all about: the Sophos software was detecting its own binaries as malware. Here’s what happened.

CodeProject[^]:

The design of CodeProject has changed over the years, as one would hope and expect. The design, however, was often a result of expedience over planning and as such it often became, well, a little haphazard and often more thought was put into cramming as much as possible on a page instead of thinking about what should actually be on a page.

Yang, who had a PhD in physics and started working for CME in 2000, wrote computer code for the company and had access to the company's proprietary software for its global trading platform.

Bastard Programmer from Hell
if you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]

The Code Project[^]:

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews.

programming in the twenty-first century[^]:

Why did the Forth community expend so much effort gazing inward, constantly rethinking and rewriting the language instead of building applications that incidentally happened to be written in Forth? Why was there such emphasis on machine-level efficiency instead of developer productivity? In 2012 it all seems like so much madness, considering that I could write a Forth interpreter in Lua that when running on an iPhone from a couple generations back would be 10,000 times faster than the most finely crafted commercial Forth of 30 years ago. I'm not even considering the tremendous hardware in any consumer-level desktop.

Less Than Dot[^]:

Yes it is finally here. The yield keyword has come to VB.Net. It has been in C# for a while. This is all in attempt, no doubt, to make C# and VB.Net a bit more compatible. To annoy us less when you have to use the other language. To make our lives easier and more comfortable. Alas they failed again.

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?