The Insider News

Code Climate Blog[^]:

We interrupt our regularly scheduled code quality content to raise awareness about a recently-disclosed, critical security vulnerability in Rails. On Tuesday, a vulnerability was patched in Rails’ Action Pack layer that allows for remote code execution. Since then, a number of proof of concepts have been publicly posted showing exactly how to exploit this issue to trick a remote server into running an attacker’s arbitrary Ruby code. This post is an attempt to document the facts, raise awareness, and drive organizations to protect their applications and data immediately.

Martin Fowler[^]:

Emacs is an elderly piece of software, dating back to the mid 70's. Its philosophy of allowing people to easily extend it by modifying the live environment is something shared with a few other elderly-but-groundbreaking systems, such as lisp machines and Smalltalk. That philosophy seems rarer now.

Damien Katz[^]:

For years I've tried my damnedest to get away from C. Too simple, too many details to manage, too old and crufty, too low level. I've had intense and torrid love affairs with Java, C++, and Erlang. I've built things I'm proud of with all of them, and yet each has broken my heart. They've made promises they couldn't keep, created cultures that focus on the wrong things, and made devastating tradeoffs that eventually make you suffer painfully. And I keep crawling back to C. C is the total package.

Engadget[^]:

In making the move from the Surface RT to the Surface Pro, we step up from 1,366 x 768 resolution to 1080p. Same 10.6-inch screen, just a lot more pixel density. And believe us when we say the difference is appreciable. In a side-by-side comparison with the RT, everything looked a little sharper, a little less pixelated. The "S" in the word "Start" on the Start screen, for instance, is thinner, less jagged than on the RT. It's a difference anyone can appreciate, even people who swear they're not display snobs....

Bill Reiss' Development Blog[^]:

With all of the hype about HTML 5, it sounded like we were on the way to web development nirvana where as long as you coded to the HTML 5 spec, things would “just work”. This is a great idea and it would be true except for the fact that developers are not coding to the HTML 5 spec, they are making sure that their stuff works great with WebKit based browsers. You can’t blame them since Safari and Chrome use WebKit, and therefore a huge majority of their mobile users are on WebKit. The W3C sees the danger of this and is very concerned that WebKit could become the defacto standard.

Ars Technica[^]:

A previously unknown and currently unpatched security hole in the latest version of the Java software framework is under attack online, according to security researchers and bloggers. Attack code that exploits vulnerability in Java's browser plugin has been added to the Blackhole, Cool, Nuclear Pack, and Redkit exploit kits, according to the Malware Don't Need Coffee blog, prompting its author to say that the bug is being "massively exploited in the wild."

Gamasutra[^]:

When going back to replay classic games I played as a kid to mine them for knowledge, I always fear that any games from the NES era or earlier are too old to learn much from. I tend to assume that many elements of modern design will be missing: no training, bad difficulty ramping, haphazard level design, and so forth. Before writing this article, I was under the impression that many "good design principles" I've come to know and love were invented during the SNES era and iterated on from there. The NES was the Wild West of game development, I thought, lawless and free.... As it turns out, I was totally wrong! Instead of finding something outdated with a ton of nostalgia value, I found an excellent primer in the fundamentals of non-linear game design.

The Industry[^]:

2013 should be a wonderful year for designers and developers alike. More opportunities are presenting themselves each day and with those opportunities, risks are taken and trends are set. We’ll see which of these trends survive and which ones may not come to fruition. Are there any other ones you feel will take 2013 by storm?

Paul Hammant's blog[^]:

Perforce is not designed for end-user applications. It is designed for developers, and to store source code (and related bits and pieces). We’re ignoring that, and using where we could have used CouchDB, Postgres or one of a hundred other choices. Why Perforce and not a SQL or a NoSQL database? Branches and merge-ability. Why Perforce and not Git/GitHub? Permissions per branch....

Greg's Cool [Insert Clever Name] of the Day[^]:

The free TFS Source Control History Visualization extension for Visual Studio 2012, based on the Gource tool project and created by Alexander Biryukov.... Not sure if it's something I'd use often, but that doesn't take away from it's shear coolness!