The Insider News

Addy Osmani[^]:

The Chrome comic book was originally designed as a limited edition print book for journalists all the way back in 2008. What you may not have known is that it's also a fantastic read for any web developer. Released during the week of our first Chrome launch, the comic described our multi-process architecture, how the V8 JavaScript engine works, predictive DNS lookups (for optimizing based on your usage patterns) and many technical architectural concepts in a way that was surprisingly accessible to the everyday user.

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.