The Insider News

The Danger Zone[^]:

Sampling theory deals with the process of taking some continuous signal that varies with one or parameters, and sampling the signal at discrete values of those parameters. If you’re not familiar with signals and signal processing, you can think of a signal as some continuous function of any dimension that varies along its domain. To sample it, we then calculate that function’s value at certain points along the curve.

Living in an Ivory Basement[^]:

After yet another round of futile Twittering on the subject of research software, I thought I'd share a deeply personal story -- a story that explains some of my rather adamant stance that most research scientists need to think more critically about their code, and should adopt at least some of the basic coding hygiene used by virtually every modern practicing programmer.

ScanMySite[^]:

Bitcoin is a digital currency, shared among its peer network that helps people to buy and sell things online with no connection to their local currency. Sounds enticing, but this young concept is not for the faint-hearted. Its growing success has attracted incessant attacks against both individuals and Bitcoin merchants. This post explores the risks associated with adopting the fledgling currency and looks at some of the major security breaches that have hit the headlines in the last year.

The Future of Reading[^]:

Despite being one of its inventors, I can see a time when ClearType becomes obsolete. It solved a real problem of too-low display resolutions when we invented it about nine years ago, and I estimate it still has a long useful life in front of it. But it definitely has a limited lifespan. How long that will be depends on how quickly displays move towards higher resolution. That might take longer than anyone realizes. In fact, maybe a combination of ClearType and hardware resolution will get us where we need to be - in which case it could be around forever.

Channel 9[^]:

The most important operating system developers write software for is not Windows or OSX or Linux or Android. It's Homo sapiens 1.0. We make software for people first. Very wise words from a very wise soul, Bill Hill.

PCWorld[^]:

Personal computers have been around long enough to become a part of our history and shared social consciousness. As time marches on and older hardware dies, emulation is often the only way to experience these orphaned systems again. Amiga has been mourned more than most. Emulators are tricky business, however. Mastering and maintaining them can sap enough enthusiasm that you're left wondering why you bothered. Cloanto carefully sized up this common problem when putting together its Amiga Forever package, and the results are impressive.

Computerworld[^]:

Microsoft has exhausted its initial supply of the lowest-priced Surface RT tablet, which now is backordered by three weeks.

Mark Pearl[^]:

A few years ago I blogged about FizzBuzz. At the time I thought I would give the problem a go in F# and sure enough the solution was fairly simple – I then also did a basic solution in C# but never posted it. Since then I have learned that being able to solve a problem and how you solve the problem are two totally different things. Today I decided to give the problem a retry and see if I had learnt anything new in the last year or so.

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.