The Insider News

John Teague's Blog[^]:

To say that understanding polymorphism is critical to understanding how to effectively utilize an object-oriented language is a bit of an understatement. It’s not just a central concept, it’s the concept you need to understand in order to build anything of size and scope beyond the trivial. Yet, as important as it is I feel it is often quickly glossed over in most computer science curriculums. From my own experience, I took two courses that focused on OOP, undergraduate and graduate, but I don’t think I truly understood its importance until later.

inessential.com[^]:

When I was developing an RSS reader, users often asked me if I would make it sync via Dropbox (or WebDAV or iDisk or similar). For a while, years ago, before Dropbox existed, my reader did sync by writing files to iDisk. It didn’t work very well at all, and, looking back, I shouldn’t have shipped this feature. I made a mistake.

KishoreLive[^]:

I used to loathe static typing. From PHP to JavaScript to Python to Ruby, I was pretty much a dynamic typing fan boy.... Over time, not only have I learned to appreciate languages with good type systems, I actually now prefer them for solving certain classes of problems.

Mike Bostock[^]:

I love Make. You may think of Make as merely a tool for building large binaries or libraries (and it is, almost to a fault), but it’s much more than that. Makefiles are machine-readable documentation that make your workflow reproducible.... The beauty of Make is that it’s simply a rigorous way of recording what you’re already doing. It doesn’t fundamentally change how you do something, but it encourages to you record each step in the process, enabling you (and your coworkers) to reproduce the entire process later.

Interoperability Happens[^]:

It didn't start with Java--it started well before that, with a set of cross-platform C++ toolkits that promised the same kind of promise: write your application in platform-standard C++ to our API, and we'll have the libraries on all the major platforms (back in those days, it was Windows, Mac OS, Solaris OpenView, OSF/Motif, and a few others) and it will just work. Even Microsoft got into this game briefly...

Learning by Shipping[^]:

In what could be considered an extremely bold and thoughtful move, according to reports Yahoo recently announced that employees will be required to work from a Yahoo facility rather than “remote”. As one who has spent time on these challenges, the commentary that followed was arguably predictable. With reactions ranging from tone deaf and archaic to downright anti-motherhood, there seems to be a great deal of pushback or at least feedback. Like so many things in managing a large organization there is no clear cut way to manage through this structural and organizational challenge. What are some of the considerations in attempting to structure a modern product development team?

Jacques Mattheij[^]:

I believe that a lack of domain knowledge is the root cause of a lot of very bad software that gets developed and I think that it is up to computer programmers and their managers to deal with this. Acquiring domain knowledge is an essential component in the development of software that really works well for its users. A programmer that has to automate a warehouse but that has never picked an order and doesn’t have a clue about actual logistics is going to be writing far less effective software than someone that has done a few shifts on the floor.

touch /dev/null[^]:

After so many years of multiple OSes, I am surprised that there isn’t a single filesystem that is truely cross-platform and modern. The keyword is modern. FAT32 is still the only candidate for a true cross-platform Filesystem, but its dated, it has very hard limitations on file-sizes that makes it hard if you want to store 4gig+ movies, games, and other data.

Ars Technica[^]:

By the time Sony unveiled the PlayStation 4 at last night's press conference, the rumor mill had already basically told us what the console would be made of inside the (as-yet-nonexistent) box: an x86 processor and GPU from AMD and lots of memory. Sony didn't reveal all of the specifics about its new console last night (and, indeed, the console itself was a notable no-show), but it did give us enough information to be able to draw some conclusions about just what the hardware can do. Let's talk about what components Sony is using, why it's using them, and what kind of performance we can expect from Sony's latest console when it ships this holiday season.

Hack a Day[^]:

Scratch, a graphical programming language developed by MIT’s Media Lab, is an excellent tool for teaching programming. Daniel created an Arduino Sensor Shield to interface with Scratch, allowing for real-world input to the language. This board is a derivative of the Picoboard, which is designed for use with Scratch. Fortunately, the communication protocol was well documented, and Daniel used the same protocol to talk to the graphical programming environment. The shield includes resistance sensing, a light sensor, a sound sensor, and a sliding potentiometer.

zdnet.com:

Microsoft's Windows Azure storage service went down worldwide just before 4 p.m. ET/9 p.m. UTC, apparently due to an expired HTTPS certificate.