The Insider News

Virtuous Code[^]:

As readers of this blog know, I am a proud user of the third most baffling editor in existence. (Why third? well, I feel confident placing Vim as the 2nd, because while inscrutable, hand-twisting keybindings are difficult, in my observation modal editing is a slightly bigger mental leap for the programming newbie. The most serenely baffling editor of all is, of course, ed.) I also spend quite a lot of time tutoring newbie programmers. One thing I do not advise them to do is to learn Emacs. Not right away, anyway. I have been guilty doing of that in the past; consider this my statement of repentance.

LispyScript[^]:

An inherent problem with Javascript is that it has no macro support, unlike other Lisp like languages. That's because macros manipulate the syntax tree while compiling. And this is next to impossible in a language like Javascript. In LispyScript we write Javascript in a tree structure. If you know Javascript and a Lisp like language, then using LispyScript will be a breeze. Even if you don't know a Lispy Language, all you need to learn is to write code in a tree structure.

DevExpress CodeRush Tips and Tricks[^]:

Recently, we have created a console application that parses an entire solution and shows summary information about declared types and the number of members in each type. Let’s tweak it a bit, so it provides more meaningful and useful information, such as a report of Maintenance Complexity (MC) code metric for a solution source code.

Github[^]:

This page is in response to Robert Scoble's declaration that the death spiral of MySpace can be attributed to their bet on the Microsoft technology stack, specifically .NET. As a developer with an interest in developing high-performance scalable systems using C# I've learned a few things in my research on what makes systems perform and scale well which is what I'd like to share to the wider .NET world. In order to keep this document palatable and provide the most value I will try to stick to point form and link to various topics and articles with the intention for this to serve as a jump page into your own research.

Computerworld[^]:

Almost half of IT managers in a survey last month said that they plan to standardize their company's mobile platform on devices running Microsoft operating systems, including smartphone OSes Windows Phone 7.5 and Windows Phone 8 and tablet OS Windows RT.

InfoWorld[^]:

Eugene Kaspersky had something of a Larry Ellison moment this week, making the bold claim that he and his company are doing what no one else has ever even attempted: Developing a secure operating system. Not only is the assertion wholly inaccurate (of course companies have attempted to develop secure OSes in the past), but the pledge of delivering a completely secure OS -- even for something as specifically niche-y as SCADA systems and ICSes -- borders on irresponsible in that it's all but impossible to keep.

Wired.com[^]:

Facebook knows who your friends are. Google knows what you’re interested in finding on the internet. Amazon knows what you’ve bought, and has a pretty good idea of what you might want to buy next. If you were an advertiser, which company’s data sounds most valuable to you? If you had a product you wanted to sell, which of those things would you most want to know?

TechHive[^]:

Surface has a lot riding on its magnesium chassis. This tablet is clearly Microsoft’s flagship, a hero device designed to showcase the best of Microsoft’s Windows 8-based Windows RT operating system. It also represents a gamble for Microsoft as a company: This is the first time Microsoft has made a foray into manufacturing Windows hardware. So how does Surface compare? Let’s see where it stands.

The Windows Phone Developer Blog[^]:

Even if you’re not part of the Windows Phone 8 SDK Preview program, you can still start validating your site for Internet Explorer 10 on Windows Phone 8. Windows Phone 8 shares the same Internet Explorer 10 engine with Windows 8, so a PC running Windows 8 is great for initial testing.

Tudor Dumitras[^]:

In this paper, we describe a method for automatically identifying zero-day attacks from field-gathered data that records when benign and malicious binaries are downloaded on 11 million real hosts around the world. Searching this data set for malicious files that exploit known vulnerabilities indicates which files appeared on the Internet before the corresponding vulnerabilities were disclosed. We identify 18 vulnerabilities exploited before disclosure, of which 11 were not previously known to have been employed in zero-day attacks. We also find that a typical zero-day attack lasts 312 days on average and that, after vulnerabilities are disclosed publicly, the volume of attacks exploiting them increases by up to 5 orders of magnitude.

John Myles White[^]:

Testing an RNG is serious business. In total, we’ve considered using four different test suites: Diehard, Dieharder, STS and TestU01. All of these suites can be easily used to test uniform random numbers over unsigned integers. Some are also appropriate for testing uniform random numbers over floatint-point values. But we wanted to test a Gaussian RNG.

Strata[^]:

You don’t need a fancy distributed framework. You can just load the data into memory and explore it interactively in your favorite scripting language. Or, maybe, a different scripting language: data analysis is one of the few domains where special-purpose languages are very commonly used. Although in many respects these are similar to other dynamic languages like Ruby or Javascript, these languages have syntax and built-in data structures that make common data analysis tasks both faster and more concise. This article will briefly cover some of these core features for two languages that have been popular for decades — MATLAB and R — and another, Julia, that was just announced this year.

TechHive[^]:

Assisted GPS is used by millions of smartphone users every day to get driving directions, find places, and find themselves. As it turns out, the good old GPS satellite system, by itself, works very slowly and often not at all when you're indoors or walking beneath tall buildings. That's why the GPS software in your phone relies heavily on cellular and Wi-Fi networks to help it figure out where it is.

Dropbox[^]:

The Dropbox mobile client caches frequently-accessed files, so that viewing them doesn’t require a network call. Both our Android and iOS clients use the LRU caching algorithm, which often selects good files to cache. But while this is the usual algorithm for caching, I wondered: are there better algorithms, and if not, why is LRU the best option?

Wired.com[^]:

The heart beating beneath the surface of the re-imagined SimCity is the new GlassBox engine. “It’s a new simulation engine that was developed here at Maxis to support agent-based simulation,” Lead Producer Kip Katsarelis told Wired.co.uk. “It’s not necessarily related to cities, it’s a general engine; we’ve kept the code separate from SimCity. It lets you simulate very simple objects that, when composed together, can do very complex things.” “The genesis of GlassBox goes all the way back to SimCity 4,” added Creative Director Ocean Quigley, “when [engineer] Andrew Willmott and I imagined what the ultimate simulator might look like. At the time, computers weren’t powerful enough for us to implement that at any reasonable scale, so our ideas had to lie fallow until we finished Spore.”

PCWorld[^]:

When multitudes of Windows 8 users start playing with newly purchased hardware in the coming weeks and months, they'll encounter an indignity that once afflicted only smartphone and tablet users: dirty, smudgy, fingerprint-riddled touchscreens. Ah, yes, the dreaded smudge. It's a problem we've all come to grudgingly accept on mobile device screens, but PC users generally aren't so accepting of people touching—let alone leaving fingerprints on—their desktop displays.

The Verge[^]:

"Tape and strings literally made Surface." Panos Panay, general manager of the team behind the Microsoft Surface, touches an old mockup made of black and white plastic. He's forgetting glue, certainly – two panels appear to have been hot-glued to form the "tablet" part of the device — but tape and strings really are two key ingredients in this prototype, the one Panay's team used to show off what Surface would look like. It's crude and fragile, but it's also unmistakably Surface.