The Insider News

Kalzumeus Software[^]:

January has been a very bad month for Ruby on Rails developers, with two high-severity security bugs permitting remote code execution found in the framework and a separate-but-related compromise on rubygems.org, a community resource which virtually all Ruby on Rails developers sit downstream of. Many startups use Ruby on Rails. Other startups don’t but, like the Rails community, may one day find themselves asking What Do We Do When Apocalyptically Bad Things Happen On Our Framework of Choice? I thought I’d explain that for the general community.

Clark's Tech Blog[^]:

Way back in the day, when I first really got into real Mac programming I used an old IDE called Think Pascal. One of the cool things about it was that unlike Think C, it allowed programming with proportional fonts. I typically used Geneva to code in Pascal and Monoco to program in C. I later switched to doing almost all my coding in Visual Studio which didn’t work well with proportional fonts.... [Then] someone mentioned to me that Xcode actually works with proportional fonts...

Tommi Kaikkonen[^]:

Have a blog? With small adjustments, you can noticeably improve its typography. Your readers will thank you for it. This guide will help you understand the typographic foundations that will improve the readability of your articles.

Promit's Ventspace[^]:

I don’t feel that the way DirectX has been handled in recent years has been a positive thing. A number of technical decisions were made that were unfortunate, and then a number of business and marketing type decisions were made that compounded the problem. Many of the technologies (DirectInput, DirectSound, DirectShow) have splayed into a mess of intersecting fragments intended to replace them. The amount of developer support for Direct3D from Microsoft has been unsatisfactory, and anecdotal reports of internal team status have not been promising. Somebody told me a year or two back that the HLSL compiler team was one person. That’s not something you want to hear, true or not. Worst of all, though, was the communication. That’s the part that bugs me.

absorptions[^]:

If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember that it made a peculiar sound. But despite becoming so familiar, it remained a mystery for most of us. What do these sounds mean? As many already know, what you're hearing is often called a handshake, the start of a telephone conversation between two modems. The modems are trying to find a common language and determine the weaknesses of the telephone channel originally meant for human speech. Below is a spectrogram of the handshake audio.

jeremymorgan.com[^]:

So I found yet another cool use for a Raspberry Pi. You can actually use it as a file server, or more accurately a controller for a file server. All you need is your Pi and a nice external drive and you can serve files to anyone on your network. It’s pretty easy, I’ll show you how. You need the Raspberry Pi set up and connected to your network. You’ll also need an external drive. I’m using a Western Digital My Book 500 GB drive.

W3Techs[^]:

PNG is now the most popular lossless image compression format on the web. Only the lossy JPEG, which is the most appropriate format for photographs, is used on more sites. While GIF's patent issues mentioned above are long resolved, it's the technical superiority that now convinces webmasters to chose PNG over GIF.

Ars Technica[^]:

If you've been paying attention, you'll know that BlackBerry (née RIM) unveiled its long-awaited BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 handsets today alongside the BlackBerry 10 operating system. Our full reviews of both the Z10 (which we were given as we left the press event) and the BlackBerry 10 OS themselves will be here in the next few days, but in the meantime we have one question: just how fast are these phones?

NYTimes.com[^]:

Security experts hired by The Times to detect and block the computer attacks gathered digital evidence that Chinese hackers, using methods that some consultants have associated with the Chinese military in the past, breached The Times’s network.... The hackers tried to cloak the source of the attacks on The Times by first penetrating computers at United States universities and routing the attacks through them, said computer security experts at Mandiant, the company hired by The Times. This matches the subterfuge used in many other attacks that Mandiant has tracked to China.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

For me personally, the term "TFS" has historically meant "big scary corporate centralized source control" while Git has meant "small scrappy lightweight distributed source control." TFS meant connected (ZOMG, I can't code on a plane!) and Git meant occasionally connected (ZOMG, I don't know what rebase means!). However, I learned that Team Foundation Server (TFS) isn't just source control, it's a whole bug tracking, change management, application lifecycle management (ALM) suite. Source control is one pluggable piece. On the other hand, Git isn't just source control either. Git has become effectively FTP for code.

The ryg blog[^]:

If you’re curious, the actual information content of this post will be as follows: C string handling functions kinda suck. So does C++’s std::string. Dealing with wide character strings using only standard C/C++ functionality is absolutely horrible. And VC++’s implementation of said functionality is a damn minefield. That’s it. You will not actually learn anything more from reading this post. Continue at your own risk.

The PA Report[^]:

One of the largest battles in EVE Online history took place due to an accidental click, according to reports. The full details of why and how so many ships ended up battling each other is a fascinating read, but my question is what happens to the servers when something this crazy happens in the game. CCP, the creator of EVE Online, has detailed plans in place specifically for this sort of event.

Troy Hunt[^]:

As sure as night turns into day, sooner or later your PC will descend into an unrecoverable abyss where it no longer boots, stays booted or can’t even get booted to begin with.... Particularly for folks like me involved in building software, getting from zero to where you were when everything went wrong is a very high friction exercise. I reckon it’s the better part of a day’s effort to reinstall, reconfigure and restore files and you’ll still be finding missing things a month later.