The Insider News

Learning by Shipping[^]:

It is exceedingly difficult to argue against a simply designed product…so long as it does what you want or when it does more than competitive products. In fact it is so difficult to argue against simplicity that this post won’t even attempt to. Let’s state emphatically that software should always do only what you need it to do, with the fewest number of steps, and least potential for errors due to complex choices and options. On the other hand, good luck with that.

Scott Porad[^]:

Egads! I was recently given a 478 page hard-cover textbook by a major educational publisher on Scrum. You gotta be kidding me. There is so much talk and writing about Agile and Scrum and, frankly, in my opinion, 99% of it is confusing and makes things worse for the people who read it. Don’t read that stuff. Read this. Keep it simple. Here’s how Scrum works...

IEEE Spectrum[^]:

Businesses offering cloud-based services face a growing data leakage threat, say Taiwanese hardware designers. They claim to have devised a tactic to fight back: a chip with circuitry to frustrate what are known as side-channel attacks. Side-channel attacks scrutinize things like computation time, power consumption, and electromagnetic emissions to glean something about the operations of cloud servers or to steal the cryptographic keys they use.

Times Of India[^]:

We are living in an unparalleled time for technological progress. In 10 years, it will be almost impossible to describe to any child in India what life was like before the internet. Only about two billion of the world's seven billion people have an internet connection, and i believe the remaining five billion will get one in the next decade. Almost one billion of them will come online in India. They will have different needs from people online today and expect different things from the internet. Now is the moment for India to decide what kind of internet it wants for them: an open internet that benefits all or a highly regulated one that inhibits innovation.

Computerworld[^]:

After a computer glitch sidelined NASA's Mars rover Curiosity late last month, another problem has it down again. NASA reported that Curiosity put itself into safe mode on Saturday after a software bug caused a command file to fail a size-check. "This is a very straightforward matter to deal with," said Richard Cook, Curiosity's project manager. "We can just delete that file, which we don't need any more, and we know how to keep this from occurring in the future." NASA said late on Monday that bringing Curiosity out of safe mode is expected to take a couple of days.

Ars Technica[^]:

Newly leaked documentation accompanying the developer's kit for the successor to the Xbox 360, codenamed Durango, is rekindling rumors that the new system will require disc-based games to be installed to a hard drive before being played. The "Hardware Overview" included in the Xbox Developer Kit help files was obtained and published by VGLeaks, and it matches up closely with rumors leaked last month by SuperDaE... The document discusses how Durango games will be distributed via Blu-ray disc (an upgrade from the Xbox 360's DVDs) but says those games won't be playable directly from that optical media. Instead "all games will be installed on the hard drive... disc media will be used for distribution, but during gameplay, games will not use content from the optical disc."

AllThingsD[^]:

This month marks the third anniversary of Apple’s iPad. Since it hit the market, it has sold over 120 million units, and tablets in general have taken off. But large-screen tablets like the 9.7-inch iPad have remained dear for many budgets. The latest iPad and Microsoft’s new Surface RT start at $499. Even lower-priced, full-size tablets from name-brand companies typically cost $300 to $400. To pay significantly less, you’ve had to opt for a much smaller unit, in the 7-inch range. Now, major manufacturers are lowering prices for some larger-screen tablets to at least slightly below $300.

James Long[^]:

The canvas element was introduced with HTML5 and provides an API for rendering on the web. The API is simple, but if you've never done graphics work before it might take some getting used to. It has great cross-browser support at this point, and it makes the web a viable platform for games.... In this article, we're going to create a 2d game with canvas; a real game with sprites, animations, collision detection, and of course, explosions! What's a game without explosions?

Shopify[^]:

A common traffic pattern we see at Shopify is the flash sale, where a product will be discounted heavily or only available for a very short period of time. Our customer's flash sales can cause traffic spikes an order of magnitude above our typical traffic rate. This blog post highlights one of the problems dealing with these traffic surges that we solved during our preparation for the holiday shopping season. In a flash sale scenario, with our app servers under high load, response time grows. As our response time increases, customers attempting to buy items will hit refresh in frustration. This was causing a snowball effect that would contribute to reduced availability.

Octopus Deploy[^]:

Breaking it down, what I've called "buildable artifacts" usually means source code, which should be housed in a version control system. A build process takes those artifacts, and produces new artifacts: artifacts which are ready to be deployed with a deployment process. These artifacts are typically binaries, usually packaged into some kind of format, and stamped with metadata explaining the contents. This idea of decoupling the build process from the deployment process is important.

Bilaw.al Hameed[^]:

A short while ago, I discovered that JavaScript allows you to change the href after you click on it. It may not seem that serious at first glance, but rest assured, it can trick customers into giving in their details to fraudsters. Let me show you an example....

inessential.com[^]:

At NewsGator and Sepia Labs I worked with Brian Reischl, one of the server-side guys. Among other things, he worked on NewsGator’s RSS content service, which reads n million feeds once an hour. (I don’t know if I can say what n is. It surprised me when I heard it. The system is still running, by the way.) Brian is intimately acquainted with the different ways feeds can be screwed up. So he posted Stupid Feed Tricks on Google Docs. I quote the entire thing below for people like me who don’t have Google accounts.