The Insider News

Quote:

The Register
There’s a kind of cognitive dissonance in most people who’ve moved from the academic study of computer science to a job as a real-world software developer. The conflict lies in the fact that, whereas nearly every sample program in every textbook is a perfect and well-thought-out specimen, virtually no software out in the wild is, and this is rarely acknowledged.

TechNet[^]:

Microsoft Small Basic puts the fun back into computer programming. With a friendly development environment that is very easy to master, it eases students of all ages into the world of programming. This list will eventually contain every program made via Small Basic.

simple-talk.com[^]:

Earlier this year I left the comfortable world of XAML and WPF behind and began developing almost exclusively in JavaScript. My daily focus has also switched from developing desktop applications to Single Page Applications (SPAs) using ASP.NET MVC and KnockoutJS: but, as we’ll see, JavaScript does not restrict me to web development.... I thought long and hard before making the move and, after twelve years in one place, I even changed jobs to facilitate the effort. I thought it would be worthwhile to share some of my reasoning behind this latest change of direction.

don't code today what you can't debug tomorrow[^]:

Nobody likes to read complex code, especially if it’s someone’s else code. A preventive approach to block any complex code entering the application is by watching its complexity carefully. There are many measures of code complexity, the popular ones are McCabes cyclomatic complexity and Halsteads complexity. For JavaScript applications, there is a new tool from Phil Booth called JSComplexity which can be used to analyze your code and find out the complexity measures.

Pat Shaughnessy[^]:

Why does Ruby share a single value across all of the subclasses? Why have a distinction between “class variables” and “class instance variables?” Where do these ideas come from? It turns out the answer is simple: class variables in Ruby work the same way class variables work in a much older language called Smalltalk.

Eric Holk[^]:

In programming language terms, I seem to be doing some kind of just-in-time compilation. The first time through, I read and interpret every instruction. Afterwards, it seems like I remember what this function does and am able to determine its output much quicker. Interpreting the first call takes about 24 seconds, while I blow through the second one in about 10 seconds.

The Tech Block[^]:

There’s been some great discussion over the last few years about mobile first versus web first.... I don’t believe this is the right way to think about the issue, though. I think we are using the wrong definition of ‘web.’ The web definition I’m focusing on is as a set of technologies used for storing and disseminating information. I use ‘web client’ as the front-end technology and customer-facing portion of the site.

BetterExplained[^]:

The Fourier Transform is one of deepest insights ever made. Unfortunately, the meaning is buried within dense equations. Rather than deciphering it symbol-by-symbol, let's experience the idea (hear the song then read the sheet music, dig?).

TidBITS[^]:

When I first began writing about Apple security the situation was bleak yet meaningless. Bleak thanks to a company that didn’t prioritize security and not only responded poorly to issues, but left the platform wildly exposed to potential attacks. Meaningless, since said attacks never actually happened in the real world. As much as I may have fretted over the lack of security features or what the future might hold, my worries were trifles considering a near-complete absence of actual problems for users.... Today Apple is the second most popular brand in the world... with dominating sales in smartphones, laptops, and tablets.... Never before have so many users relied so much on the security efforts of the company from Cupertino.

Ars Technica[^]:

In a move that has raised eyebrows, Microsoft has submitted a patch to the WebKit project to extend the open source rendering engine with a prototype implementation of the Pointer Events specification that the company is also working on together with Google, Mozilla, and Opera. WebKit is the rendering engine used in Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome browsers, making Microsoft's work a contribution to products that are in direct competition to its own.

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

This is... a small primer for those who don’t quite get all this anti-malware stuff. At its core anti-malware seems pretty straightforward. You take something that can be run (usually an “image” or “executable”, but for sake of the audience we’ll just say App) and run a mathematical algorithm over it that produces an (almost) unique identifier for that App. Generally that unique identifier is called a Hash (because of the technique used). Anytime you run the same algorithm over the same App you get the same Hash.... If someone modifies an app, even slightly, it will have a different Hash. So the Hash tells you exactly what you have.

8th Light[^]:

In the last 40 years computer hardware technology has increased the computing power of our machines by well over twenty orders of magnitude. We now play Angry Birds on our phones, which have the computing power of the freon cooled supercomputer monsters of the 70s. But in that same 40 years software technology has barely changed at all. After all, we still write the same if statements, while loops, and assignment statements we did back in the ‘60s.