The Insider News

NCZOnline[^]:

Annual reviews are a reminder that your reputation matters. For most of the year, software engineers don’t care at all what anybody else thinks as long as they’re getting the job done. Then annual reviews come along and we realize we might have rubbed some people the wrong way.... What makes it more difficult for software engineers is that we deal so much with code that we sometimes forget how important it is to deal with people.

jeffhandley.com[^]:

Why do the words “we accept pull requests” have such a stigma? Why were they cringe-inducing when I spoke them? Because too many OSS projects use these words as an easy way to shut people up. We (the collective of OSS project owners) can too easily jump to this phrase when we don’t want to do something ourselves. If we don’t see the value in a feature, but the requester persists, we can simply utter, “We accept pull requests,” and drop it until the end of days or when a pull request is submitted, whichever comes first.

Jesse Chapo[^]:

I’ve regularly received questions from developer friends who are a bit baffled with images and the somewhat confusing formats. I’m also heard from some developers that they hate receiving a PSD with no instructions and having to wade through the overwhelming options of Photoshop. This short guide is aimed at explaining the basics of image formats and giving you some simple rules that you can apply everyday when you are actually trying to get [work] done with Photoshop.

Ars Technica[^]:

LG announced yesterday that it would be acquiring webOS from HP to use in LG smart televisions. The company has inherited all of the rights to the source code for webOS, including documentation and engineers, as well as all of its related websites. But what about projects like Open webOS and webOS Ports?

IEBlog[^]:

Internet Explorer 10 is available worldwide in 95 languages for download today. We will begin auto updating Windows 7 customers to IE10 in the weeks ahead, starting today with customers running the IE10 Release Preview. With this final release, IE10 brings the same leading standards support, with improved performance, security, privacy, reliability that consumers enjoy on Windows 8, to Windows 7 customers.

engadget.com[^]:

Wow. This is certainly a departure. If you're going to charge an obscene premium for a laptop with an incredibly limited OS, you'd better produce something that is incredibly well-made. In that regard, the Chromebook Pixel is a complete success. If you'll forgive us just one cliche, Google has gone from zero to hero with the Pixel. It's truly something to behold.

Penny Arcade[^]:

I was aware of the Surface Pro but I wasn’t especially interested in it until I heard it came with a stylus and supported pressure sensitivity. I love gadgets and drawing so it only makes sense that I’ve always been curious about gadgets you can draw on. Since the old Windows tablet computers I’ve been looking for a good way to draw digitally on the go. I gave the iPad a shot but I don’t like drawing with the “eraser tip” capacitive touch styluses. When I read that the Surface Pro uses Wacom tech I was interested...

The Register[^]:

Server 2012 is the Microsoft operating system that, in my opinion, makes cloud computing a reality. As far as I am concerned it is as big a leap over Server 2008 R2 as that OS was over Server 2003. With it you can build anything from a small cluster to a service as big as Microsoft's own Azure platform. Which is why I am completely baffled as to how it is possible that Azure was knocked offline by last week's SSL c**k-up.

Quote: arstechnica[^]

Parents whose kids blew their money buying virtual goods in "free" apps from Apple's iPad store will be getting refunds in the near future. That is, if a judge approves a settlement recently filed in a class-action lawsuit.

computerweekly.com:

The outage affected as many as 52 different Microsoft services, including Xbox Live, for up to 24 hours.

good coders code, great reuse[^]:

Did you know you could traceroute over the TCP protocol? The regular traceroute usually uses either ICMP or UDP protocols. Unfortunately firewalls and routers often block the ICMP protocol completely or disallow the ICMP echo requests (ping requests), and/or block various UDP ports. However you'd rarely have firewalls and routers drop TCP protocol on port 80 because it's the web's port.

2ality.com[^]:

If you search the Mozilla Central code base for the texts "Perl" and "Python" (don’t ignore case) then the comments mention what methods have been borrowed from those languages.

Imran Nazar[^]:

Build a JPEG decoder? Whatever for, when we have so many of them already? JPEG is something we all take for granted: most of the Web comprises pictures transmitted as JPEG files, and video files based on JPEG technology. As it turns out, the concepts that lie behind these images span nearly two hundred years of mathematics and computing theory, and going from the raw file to an image takes a bunch of interesting work.