The Insider News

Arunoda Susiripala[^]:

For a developer like me, font rendering is very important since, I always work with code, read stuff and do many things with letters most of the time. Ubuntu renders font really good and it’s ubuntu font is really cool. After installing Windows fonts, It looks really cool on the web too. For me Mac’s font rendering looks so weired mostly on the Web. I copied windows fonts to the fonts folder as I did in Ubuntu but still no luck.

DZone[^]:

The problems with JavaScript come from premature standardization. The language’s author Brendan Eich said: "I had to be done in ten days or something worse than JS would have happened." For a programming language designed in 10 days, he did an amazing job. Maybe he did too good a job: his first draft was good enough to use, and so he never got a chance to fix the language’s flaws. The opposite of JavaScript may be Perl 6.

Hadi Hariri's Blog[^]:

Did you know that you can run ReSharper Code Inspections on the server using TeamCity? In fact, we added support for this functionality in TeamCity just over a year ago but it seems that the feature is not widely known, specially by ReSharper users. The setup itself is extremely simple, and we’re going to walk through it, and additionally add some more goodies in the mix.

Mobility Digest[^]:

For those of us who have been Windows Phone fans for a long time, we know what it’s like to watch a major release go awry. Well, quite frankly, it’s pretty much all we’ve seen. We’ve grown used to a total lack of noise from its inception and even simple mistakes like launching the flagship Lumia 900 on Easter. Just so many missed opportunities but with the release of Windows Phone 8, Microsoft is doubling down on the strategy of bungling major rollouts. Let’s just look at where things are in the US market.

ZDNet[^]:

In preparation for taking on Intel in servers and storage ARM has developed a new networking technology for its chips that lets them reach higher core counts than before while being able to effectively pass information across the chip.

BetterExplained[^]:

Linear algebra gives you mini-spreadsheets for your math equations. We can take a table of data (a matrix) and create updated tables from the original. It’s the power of a spreadsheet written as an equation. Here’s the linear algebra introduction I wish I had, with a real-world stock market example.

TechHive[^]:

Microsoft's Surface tablets are more than just an experiment. They're the first sign of a radical pivot for Microsoft, away from software licensing and toward one big ecosystem of hardware and services. In an annual letter to shareholders, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer hinted at major changes for the company, saying that there is a “fundamental shift underway in our business and the areas of technology that we believe will drive the greatest opportunity in the future.”

Technology Review[^]:

A back door installed in networking hardware could be very difficult to detect, says Schneider. "If you siphon off lots [of data], then someone who was looking would notice," he says. But "if it's a small scale, it would be pretty hard to tell." That's because part of the Internet is designed to be fault-tolerant and allow the occasional piece of data to go missing. "It would be hard to distinguish between drops and retries and something nefarious..."

Badass JavaScript[^]:

As developers begin to explore building audio applications in the browser, we are beginning to see more and more interesting demos. Pedalboard.js is no exception. It is a framework for building guitar pedalboard effects in the browser, including both UI widgets like pots and switches, as well as the audio effects themselves and the routing between them. The demo allows you to play with a number of prebuilt effects and apply them to various prerecorded samples, as well as live audio input from your microphone if you’re running Chrome Canary.

Channel 9[^]:

Creating a robot that could be beaten up for 4 hours and still work proved to be an interesting problem. After doing some research on different configurations and styles, it was decided we should leverage a prior project to get a jump start to meet the deadline. We repurposed sections of our Kinect drivable lounge chair, Jellybean! This was an advantage because it contained many known items, such as the motors, motor controllers, and chassis material. Additionally, it was strong and fast, it was modular, and the code to drive it was already written.

Nettuts+[^]:

Lately, we’ve been hearing and reading more and more about test-driven development. This domain, however, comes with a series of expressions and specific jargon that can be confusing to newcomers. This article will walk you through the most common definitions, test types and test parts. Use cases will be provided, and, where possible, some code in PHP will also be presented.