The Insider News

Ars Technica[^]:

In my review of Get Lamp, the documentary about text adventures, I mentioned that the original Infocom employees believed the market for these games could exist for hundreds of years. After all, the novel is still around today and, despite stiff competition from movies and video games, writing fiction is still a profitable endeavor. Why not interactive fiction? The reality, however, is that since the demise of Infocom in 1989, many people have tried to make interactive fiction into a commercial endeavor. None have been able to figure out how to make the financial side work—until recently. Everything changed with the rise of smartphones and tablets.

Entrepreneurial Seduction[^]:

“All the marketable software has already been written.” That sounds like a true enough statement. How am I going to make any money writing software when all the app ideas have been taken and the established software companies are already controlling the market? What software can I write that will allow me to earn a living? Of course I said this in 1982 when I was mainly doing contract development on Apple ][, CP/M, and the newly popular PC-DOS machines.

Linux User[^]:

Jon Masters summarises the goings-on in the Linux kernel community as the 3.9 kernel was being prepared for release. Ongoing development brings with it security headaches, and kernel testing is improved by the Trinity ‘Fuzzer’.

Gamasutra[^]:

One of Game Developer's most popular features was our "Dirty Coding Tricks" bit from 2009, where we got devs to open up about some of the ugly hacks they've resorted to in order to make a ship deadline or pass certification. Well, we're back with nine new from-the-trenches stories, including a few unorthodox tricks from other dev disciplines besides programming. So read on, revel in your colleagues' ingenuity, and relax -- because you're not the only one that pulls out a dirty trick under pressure.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog[^]:

AOL has announced the debut of its latest online service --an RSS reader to replace the soon-to-be-defunct Google Reader. The new AOL Reader is a no-frills web app for reading your RSS feeds. There are no mobile apps, but the service does have a tablet-friendly layout for your on-the-go reading.

plus.maths.org[^]:

"I think I'll stop here." This is how, on 23rd of June 1993, Andrew Wiles ended his series of lectures at the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge. The applause, so witnesses report, was thunderous: Wiles had just delivered a proof of a result that had haunted mathematicians for over 350 years: Fermat's last theorem. Wiles’ announcement now celebrates its twentieth birthday, but the result itself is linked to maths that is over 2000 years old.

Redmondmag.com[^]:

Microsoft has added a new security option for those using its Windows Azure cloud service. Administrators can block unauthorized users from accessing virtual machines, Microsoft quietly announced at its TechEd conference in New Orleans earlier this month. The new option lets administrators put Access Control Lists (ACLs) on individual endpoints. By putting the ACLs on endpoints or subnets, administrators can control unauthorized access to virtual machines that are protected behind a firewall but are accessible in the public cloud.

SemiAccurate[^]:

The product grabbing the headlines is the new Nytro WarpDrive BFH8-3200, a product that for once lives up to the hype in it’s name. This is a full height PCIe3 8x flash storage card that has 3.2TB of usable space, 4.0TB of actual flash for those who want the numbers under the hood. LSI claims a 4.0GBps, not Gbps mind you, sustained throughput for performance, a fairly staggering amount.

ZDNet[^]:

Friday Facebook announced the fix of a bug it said inadvertently exposed the private information of over six million users when Facebook's previously unknown shadow profiles accidentally merged with user accounts in data history record requests. According to Reuters, the data leak spanned a year beginning in 2012.

Dream.In.Code[^]:

Now there's actual large infrastructure to support developers who want to create and publish their Linux games without having to deal with the usual lack of central standard authority themselves. Considering the direction Windows is going, this whole Linux game development thing doesn't seem so pointless after all. Having a multi-platform engine also has the advantage of being able to run games on special and portable devices that have become popular. You can easily adapt your engine to fit more devices when you use libraries that already have multiple versions (like SDL, OpenGL, etc.). It becomes easy to target even niche devices like the Raspberry Pi.

Dr. Axel Rauschmayer[^]:

What is the best way to learn JavaScript? If you haven’t programmed before, you first have learn what programming is. If you are a programmer, though, you can take a shortcut: You already know many programming language constructs and just need to learn how they are expressed in JavaScript. Assuming that you are a programmer, the goal of this blog post is to get you started with JavaScript as quickly as possible. It describes the smallest subset of the language that allows you to be productive.

Visual Studio Magazine[^]:

The Facade pattern is a common software design pattern used to create a simple unified interface for a set of interfaces in a system. The Facade interface is a higher-level interface that allows easier control of a set of subsystem interfaces without affecting the subsystem interfaces. Today I'll demonstrate how to implement the Facade pattern in the .NET Framework.

Dr Dobb's[^]:

If you work with C#, you have already mixed object-oriented code with some aspects of functional programming. Why not master Scala? Scala usage in enterprise applications is growing faster than the number of available developers, so there is an increasing demand for .NET developers to learn Scala — using existing C#, VB.NET, LINQ, and F# knowledge as a foundation. In this first article in a series dedicated to Scala for C# developers, I provide an introduction to Scala and its most popular IDE. It is aimed at those who spend their days with Visual Studio, but are interested in learning the increasingly popular JVM language.

The Pragmatic Bookshelf[^]:

Elixir is a functional programming language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine. It has a Ruby-like syntax, and features protocols (for extending modules without changing their source), macros, and very good metaprogramming support. It has the benefit of learning from other languages’ experiences, too, so it has many modern features. For example, protocols and macros are lexically scoped, so metaprogramming no longer risks messing up the global execution environment.

LispCast[^]:

The other day I wrote about some principles that programming in Clojure makes very clear. Those principles could be applied just as well in Java, and often are. However, there are some things that make Clojure distinct. Three of those distinctions are the way it deals with state change (using an STM), the Persistent Data Structures, and the literal syntax for data with a reader (now called edn). Diving into the source code for Clojure, I realized that these three bits were written in Java. And that means that they can be used from Java.

Smashing UX Design[^]:

If I could be remembered for just one thing, I’d want it to be this, because this is what designers and companies need to know and understand about the nature of user experience as a profession, a goal, an idea. And it’s taken me 13 years to be able to say it in exactly this way. Following is my list of 13 beliefs on the value of user experience strategy, design, and designers, one for every year I’d been in the web industry at the time I wrote it.

Jon Skeet: Coding Blog[^]:

Back when I used to post on newsgroups I would frequently be in the middle of a debate of the details of some behaviour or terminology, when one poster would say: “You’re just quibbling over semantics” as if this excused any and all previous inaccuracies. I would usually agree – I was indeed quibbling about semantics, but there’s no “just” about it. Semantics is meaning, and that’s at the heart of communication – so for example, a debate over whether it’s correct to say that Java uses pass- by-reference1 is all about semantics. Without semantics, there’s nothing to talk about.

Ars Technica[^]:

With Apple’s licensing of Microsoft’s exFAT file system, it seemed like the main problem with FAT32—the 4GB file size limit—was put to rest, and many people are probably now using it to swap video libraries between their MacBooks and HTPCs or share downloads between OS X and Boot Camped Windows. But exFAT has its own issues and limitations that few people are probably aware of—and considering how few people even know about exFAT, we thought this was a good opportunity to cover it, along with the various alternatives.

The Blue Dragon is Looking@Me[^]:

Nowadays I boot into my Windows 7, check my mail and browse some web; then I click on VirtualBox and start Lubuntu to code web application (Python, Flask, Brunch, etc.), where I spent most of the time on. It's funny I spend most of my time in a VM.

Quote:

The use of preconditions, postconditions and invariants is extremely helpful to develop maintainable code. Unfortunately, we find preconditions quite seldom in real world applications. [...] Guava Preconditions and Apache Commons Validate class are the best choice and have almost the same functionality (just take what is more convenient in your technology stack)