The Insider News

Ars Technica[^]:

Computers are ubiquitous in modern life. They offer us portals to information and entertainment, and they handle the complex tasks needed to keep many facets of modern society running smoothly. Chances are, there is not a single person in Ars' readership whose day-to-day existence doesn't rely on computers in one manner or another. Despite this, very few people know how computers actually do the things that they do. How does one go from what is really nothing more than a collection—a very large collection, mind you—of switches to the things we see powering the modern world?

John Papa[^]:

Finding errors earlier and more easily is one of the advantages of TypeScript. You can use optionally static typed (optionally) variables, functions, objects to help detect possible mismatches in your code right in your editor. Simply add the appropriate type or define an interface for more complex and custom types, and you are off and running! Defining types is by far my favorite feature of TypeScript.

raywenderlich.com[^]:

When you make a game, you often have enemies for the player to combat. You want these enemies to seem intelligent and present a challenge to the player to keep the game fun and engaging.... Obviously I can’t cover everything in this introductory tutorial, but I can show you how to get started with a hands-on example of adding AI into a simple game! In the process of adding AI into this game, you’ll learn about two common AI techniques along the way: steering and finite state machines.

IP-TECH Group[^]:

While we have been developing a website that displayed user uploaded images in fixed size regions, we have encountered some interesting problems. Should we resize the image to fit the fixed size region? Should we crop the image? Maybe we should mix the two? The no-brainer solution is to crop the image by focusing on the center. This naîve solution gave amazingly acceptable results, but sometimes it fails badly if the interesting region lies outside the cropped zone. Our algorithm should be able to somehow locate automatically the interesting part of the image.

wekeroad.com[^]:

I made the mistake of publicly commenting on someone's idea of a RESTful API. And already - I've probably lost you. I don't know any single term more explosive and zeal-inducing than REST and "what it means to be RESTful".

Cloud Computing News[^]:

The flurry of database action over the past year rendered the usual discussion around structured or unstructured, SQL, NoSQL, and NewSQL databases even more, um, nuanced than before. Matthew Aslett, research manager at 451 Research took the bull by the horns and updated his previous (one-month-old) database road map to include all sorts of new entries. And here (drumroll please) is the result.

Agile Blog[^]:

The number of seconds since the very beginning of 1970, known as Unix time, is often maintained in a single variable in the computer’s operating system. When Unix was first designed, this number was stored in 32 bit variable. That means that the number could range from 0 to 232. Zero corresponds to the midnight January 1, 1970 (UTC). So what time does 232 correspond to? That will be 3:14:07 (UTC) on January 19, 2038. Bad things will happen then to computers that still are still using 32 bit integers to store Unix time.

MAKE[^]:

Merry Christmas, makers! We’re guessing a lot of you found Raspberry Pis under the tree this morning and are eager to start hacking around with it. We’ve compiled a list of a few of our favorite quick tips that may come in handy as you explore the platform.

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

Microsoft’s recent move to disband the Expression Studio suite, and discontinue some of its component products, is the latest example of a retrenchment that is returning the Developer Division (DevDiv) to its roots. Understanding that history will help make sense of the last couple of years of DevDiv moves, whether you think they make sense or not.

The Next Web[^]:

Russian firm ElcomSoft on Thursday announced the release of Elcomsoft Forensic Disk Decryptor (EFDD), a new forensic tool that can reportedly access information stored in disks and volumes encrypted with desktop and portable versions of BitLocker, PGP, and TrueCrypt. EFDD will still set you back a solid $299. EFDD offers access to encrypted information either by completely decrypting everything or by doing so for individual files in real time. You can choose to either decrypt all files and folders stored in the cryptographic container (full, unrestricted forensic access to all stored information) or mount the encrypted volume as new drive letter for instant access (information is decrypted on-the-fly).

Microsoft Kills Expression Suite[^]

Microsoft has announced that the Expression suite of design tools is no more. It has been removed from sale immediately and it has been placed on a maintenance only status until it reaches its end of life. However it's not all bad news...

rzetterberg

...What was one of the most interesting things I learned during this project was using different algorithms and seeing how they affected performance. The biggest performance boost I got was from switching from Insertion Sort to Heap sort when sorting data points by date...

Gamasutra

This one has been on my todo pile for a while, so as long as I am in ranting mode, I might as well get this off of my chest. It is a problem that is highly prevalent on many game developer forums, and especially so on one I often frequent, GameDev.net. Often, people will ask the question: "What should I do about college, is a game degree right for me?"

Linux User

Work began on the Hurd, the true kernel of the GNU operating system, in May 1991, but it has yet to materialise as a production-ready kernel. Richard Hillesley tells the story…