The Insider News

Chris Love's Official ASP.NET Blog[^]:

The way browsers work today has changed in many ways thanks to jQuery. Just a few years ago DOM parsing was rather complicated, jQuery made that easy. DOM manipulation was not straight forward, thanks to jQuery developers can manipulate with little effort. Today 96%+ browsers in use today support document.querySelectorAll, which accepts a CSS selector and returns a list of matching nodes. In many ways thanks to jQuery, jQuery itself is no longer needed. There I said it.... I encourage you to give it a shot. Write your next application, library or just code for fun without jQuery. See what you can do.

Jeremy Morgan Programming Blog[^]:

Gather round young coders while I tell you a little story. Way back when, far before you were born, we were building programs just like you are. After we trudged uphill barefoot in the snow, we went into a scorching hot room and we hit the plugboards with boundless enthusiasm, plugging switches in to “portable function tables” and doing arithmetic as it was meant to be done… slowly. We didn’t have any “stored programs” like you spoiled brats, we had blueprints! Punch cards! Stuff written on napkins! You kids download and app to your phone to calculate your food budget but we really earned our keep.

Divshot[^]:

A [Yahoo! Geocities-style] theme for Twitter Bootstrap, from Divshot.

Ken Norton[^]:

I’ve worked in technology for twenty years, the past thirteen as a product manager. I’ve gained somewhat of a reputation for being effective at working with software engineers.... For years I’ve kept my secrets close to the vest. But no longer: today I will share with you my Ten-Step Plan for Working With Engineers. Or more to the point: how to make engineers do what you tell them to do.

Ars Technica[^]:

Sure, every game has an ending of sorts. For a certain class of classic game, though, that ending was always of the "You Are Dead Ha Ha Ha!" variety. From Robotron 2084's ever-increasing robot hordes to Missile Command's memorable "THE END" explosion, you went into these games knowing that failure was not just an option, but really the only option. Then there are the games that seem like they should go on forever but, for one reason or another, just don't. Whether it's because of a coding error leading to an unintentional "kill screen" or a simple design choice stopping an otherwise never-ending series of loops, a lot of games that seem unbeatable at first glance can actually be conquered in one way or another.

GeekWire[^]:

Microsoft is no stranger to the concept of wrist-based computing, having worked with watchmakers to release a line of smartwatches starting nearly a decade ago. Ultimately, they didn’t catch on, and the watches were discontinued. Now, a new report from the Wall Street Journal says the company is thinking about getting into the market again, with a touch-based smartwatch of its own. The report comes amid rumors that Apple, Google and others are moving in this direction with plans for smartwatches themselves.

MIT Technology Review[^]:

Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles every two years or so.... But if an observer today was to measure this rate of increase, it would be straightforward to extrapolate backwards and work out when the number of transistors on a chip was zero. In other words, the date when microchips were first developed in the 1960s.... These guys argue that it’s possible to measure the complexity of life and the rate at which it has increased from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to more complex creatures such as worms, fish and finally mammals. That produces a clear exponential increase identical to that behind Moore’s Law although in this case the doubling time is 376 million years rather than two years.

TidBITS[^]:

In today’s installment of FlippedBITS, I want to examine a handful of common misconceptions about IMAP, a common protocol for retrieving email from a server. IMAP stands for… well, thereby hangs the first tale. IMAP’s inventor, Mark Crispin (who, sadly, died in December 2012), called the first version of his creation Interim Mail Access Protocol. Versions 2, 3, and 2bis were referred to as Interactive Mail Access Protocol, and version 4 — what’s in use today — is officially Internet Message Access Protocol. Although many Web sites claim that the acronym once stood for Internet Mail Access Protocol, I have found no credible references to back up that claim.

Alex Sexton[^]:

So someone shoulder-taps you and asks you to explain the concepts behind JavaScript Inheritance to them. In my eyes you’ve got a few options.... Sometimes these analogies get pretty crazy in my head, and I start to think that maybe instead of trying to apply known examples in the outside world in order to help people understand, it’s often better to just let someone know why they might wanna use inheritance in their programs!

Tech.Pro[^]:

I've been doing this programming thing for a long time now (8 professional years), and during that time I have accumulated a lot opinions (some are right, some are probably wrong). In this phase of my career I am looking at what programming constructs can I use to make my life easier. One thing that sticks out to me as a sore point is the keyword void.... To state it simply, void is useful when I want to perform an action on an object and don't expect a result returned. In theory it sounds great, but if I don't expect a single result back, I am most likely going to want to inspect the object itself, or perform another action on the object.