The Insider News

Hugo Guzman[^]:

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve been using spreadsheet software since the 80′s (props to my dad and brother for turning me ontoVisiCalc during the Apple IIe days). I’ve also been in love with the predominant spreadsheet software, Microsoft Excel, more or less since its inception.... And yet I don’t have Excel on my personal computer. Why? Because while Excel is certainly a very powerful software application with a wide range built-in functionality as well as a plethora of outstanding bells and whistles, my experiences over the past few years has suggested to me that Excel is simply incapable of handling the immense data sets that are fast becoming the norm in today’s (and tomorrow’s) enterprise business landscape.

kotaku[^]:

Before Sid Meier was Sid Meier—the iconic video game designer whose name is stamped on classic titles like Pirates! and Civilization—he was just another computer hacker.... Meier, who had graduated with a degree in computer science before there was a personal computer in every home, spent his spare time reading hacker magazines, fiddling with code on his Atari, and building his own versions of arcade games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man. At one point he made a space game and put it up on his office network; it hooked so many employees that his bosses forced him to take it down.

JetBrains .NET Tools Blog[^]:

You already know that we have been working on ReSharper 8 for quite a while, improving navigation, extending the scope of XAML support and introducing a project dependency viewer, among a plethora of other improvements. We’re setting our sights beyond the immediate 8.0 release though: for several months now, a part of the team has been working on something entirely new yet requested for a couple of years already: support for C++ in Visual Studio.

GitHub[^]:

MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a "Hello World" bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time.

Ariya Hidayat[^]:

Modern web browsers can leverage the ubiquitous graphics processing unit (GPU), both in mobile and desktop, to accelerate page rendering. This is particularly suitable for popular CSS features such as animation, transition, opacity, transformation, and many others. Web developers however need to ensure that all the bits and pieces work well to achieve the ideal 60 frames per second.

GameDev.net[^]:

Starting 3D programming is not an easy task to accomplish. There are a lot of new things that come into play, and they vary from choosing a programming language to selecting the correct 3D modeling software. These 10 goals are the things that when they are done, no matter in what language and with what rendering engine, you can consider yourself a semi-expert on this matter.

Dan Goldin[^]:

The Priceonomics blog is one of my favorites so when I saw that they had a programming puzzle up I decided to have some fun with it. And what’s more fun than hacking around with a quirky, esoteric programming language? I remember having fond memories of playing around with Prolog in middle school so decided to dig it up again in an attempt to solve this puzzle.

Windows Dev Center[^]:

Windows 8.1 Preview builds on the bold vision and solid foundation of Windows 8, evolving the platform to enable the next wave of app innovation. We listened to our customers and carefully evaluated telemetry data to make hardware, devices, and the user experience better. In Windows 8.1 Preview, apps continue to take center stage, introducing new ways to interact with the system and more opportunities for customers to immerse themselves in your content. Consumers and business users can experience Windows in ways that are familiar and comfortable, yet new and exciting.

Co.Design[^]:

To be honest, 3-D printing technology just isn’t there yet for consumers. It’s expensive. It’s relatively lousy. And it takes a slew of skills--from technical to artistic--to produce anything worth printing in the first place. So specialists, like designers and engineers, can enjoy its rapid fabrication, and everyone else is left behind. Today, Microsoft announced a crucial step to empower the next wave of 3-D printer adoption.

Ars Technica[^]:

Late last month, Microsoft announced a raft of interface changes that Windows 8.1 would introduce. We've been giving them a spin. As you might guess from the name, Windows 8.1 is an update to (and improvement on) Windows 8. The new user interface introduced in that operating system—the Start screen, touch-friendly "Modern" apps, the charms bar—is retained in Windows 8.1. What we see is a refinement and streamlining of these concepts.

Creative Bloq[^]:

We all use the internet almost every day and share the likes of photos, new work and personal information. Taking matters of privacy into his own hands, an internet user by the name of Sang Mun has developed a font which cannot be read by computers. Entitled 'ZXX' the font has been designed in such a way that computers with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) will not be able to recognise it.

Rafael Matsunaga[^]:

The program uses a simple genetic algorithm to evolve random two-wheeled shapes into cars over generations. Loosely based on BoxCar2D, but written from scratch, only using the same physics engine (box2d).

Troy Hunt[^]:

A little while back I wrote about Hacking yourself first and detailed a bunch of different ways for developers to seek out risks in their own apps, hopefully before attackers find them first. I’m extremely enthusiastic about this approach and believe that developers need to hone cyber-offence skills in order to properly understand – and protect their apps from – risks on the web. There’s a heap more content coming from me along these lines in a variety of formats and today it’s a free video discussion.

i-programmer.info[^]:

I’m often called upon to investigate problems with an unfamiliar SQL Server database. So I need to gather information about the server and its databases quickly. With this in mind, I have a set of scripts that I typically run, and I’ll share these with you here.... Rather than describe the code in depth, I’ll describe its purpose and meaning.

The App Business Blog[^]:

The 3rd generation Apple already runs iOS, so “all” that’s missing is an App Store, some people say. Oh, and a way to control apps other than with the anemic Apple TV remote. The solution to the latter problem is the new game controller API introduced with iOS 7. I’m speculating that compatible game controllers can come from third party accessory manufacturers as snap-ons to your existing iDevices, and as low cost freestanding devices similar in form factor to Wii remotes and other game console controllers. A minor complication is that the existing Apple TV owners don’t have game controllers, so if an App Store is introduced, I will not “just work” for them.

NCZOnline[^]:

In all of JavaScript, I’m not sure there is a more maligned piece than eval(). This simple function designed to execute a string as JavaScript code has been the more source of more scrutiny and misunderstanding during the course of my career than nearly anything else.... Despite popular theory (and Crockford’s insistence), the mere presence of eval() does not indicate a problem. Using eval() does not automatically open you up to a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) attack nor does it mean there is some lingering security vulnerability that you’re not aware of.

sitepoint.com[^]:

A common misconception about open-source is that it means code that is available for zero cost. The “Free” part of “Free open-source” talks about freedom (as in “free speech”) and not about zero cost (as in “free beer”) – the freedom to read, modify and redistribute the code. While there is natural resistance to spending money on something you are used to getting for free, commercially supporting open-source has only benefits in the long run.

ZDNet[^]:

Microsoft and Oracle announced a lot of piece parts with their June 24 partnership around Azure and Oracle databases and middleware. Here's your Cliffs Notes version: Oracle apps are now certified to run on Windows Server, Hyper-V, and Windows Azure. Up until today, they were only certified to run on Windows Server. Oracle Linux also gets added to the list of Linux varianst supported in Azure's VMs, too.