The Insider News

SmartLab[^]:

The easiest way to monitor your household from anywhere in the world is to connect an old Android smartphone with a mobile NXT robot. A NXT robot represents a cheap and simple to handle microcontroller device in combination with two servos, that allow to build a flexible mobile platform. On top of this mobile robot we place the Android smartphone. The Android smartphone acts as high-level controller that receives commands over the Internet and transmits these commands to the NXT controller over a Bluetooth connection.

Redmondmag.com[^]:

After years of flat wage growth, IT salaries are on the rise. The average Windows IT pro this year is earning $87,360 per year, up 3.25 percent this year, according to the 17th annual Redmond IT Salary Survey. Not a jaw-dropping figure, but respectable nonetheless. In fact, IT pros are benefiting from a sharpening skills shortage in security, networking, analytics, management, and product areas such as SharePoint and SQL Server development and administration.

Twitter Engineering[^]:

Trident is a new high-level abstraction for doing realtime computing on top of Twitter Storm, available in Storm 0.8.0 (released today). It allows you to seamlessly mix high throughput (millions of messages per second), stateful stream processing with low latency distributed querying. If you're familiar with high level batch processing tools like Pig or Cascading, the concepts of Trident will be very familiar.

Valve[^]:

For some time, Gabe has been interested in the possibility of moving Steam and the Source game engine to Linux. At the time, the company was already using Linux by supporting Linux-based servers for Source-based games and also by maintaining several internal servers (running a 64-bit version of Ubuntu server) for various projects. In 2011, based on the success of those efforts and conversations in the hallway, we decided to take the next step and form a new team. At that time, the team only consisted of a few people whose main purpose was investigating the possibility of moving the Steam client and Left 4 Dead 2 over to Ubuntu.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

The guilt can be crushing. Everyone seems to be getting stuff done, except you. You drag yourself out of bed, go to work, start checking email, start deleting, then poof, it's noon. Lunch, perhaps at your desk, then some awful meetings, then it's 3pm. You start REALLY working, then you start feeling decent but then it's 5pm or 6pm. It's time to start getting home. You feel like you didn't really get a lot done today so you'll work late - just tonight - to catch up.

Scientific American[^]:

Math certainly is incomprehensible to many students, but from where I sit, poor teaching is often the reason. Math education is failing many of our students. Few pre-college math teachers majored or even minored in math, and until more teachers do, improvements will be hard to come by. Ironically, it seems that people who have mastered “useless” algebra and other higher math topics tend to get jobs that pay more than middle school math teachers earn.

MacGateway[^]:

All modern computers have the ability to play high-quality digital sound, thanks to the presence of a dedicated sound card or an audio chip on the motherboard. Today’s computers produce lifelike, realistic audio, enabling us to listen to digital music collections, watch online videos and play action-packed games. However, the audio capabilities of today’s computers are the culmination of decades of development, and it took a significant contribution from the computer game industry to get us here.

Jesse Liberty[^]:

I’m spending more and more time on my Windows 8 Slate, but I don’t add programs or files to it lightly. In fact, if I add a utility, it probably means that I was finding it difficult to get my work done without it, and that the utility I added was insanely essential. Here are the 10 utilities that made the cut...

The Verge[^]:

Following concerns over the usability of the newly positioned Start button, Microsoft's guide starts by demonstrating ways to swipe in from an edge of the screen to reveal the charms bar. The hot corners, for accessing the charms bar and app switcher, are also displayed during the short tutorial. We understand that this tutorial will be a default experience for every copy of Windows 8, allowing Microsoft to teach users how to use the new interface before its Metro Start Screen is displayed.

PCWorld[^]:

In a presentation at the Black Hat security conference on Thursday, security researchers Phil Purviance and Joshua Brashars, who work for security consultancy firm AppSec Consulting, showed how known JavaScript attacks can be combined with new HTML5-based techniques to flash the DD-WRT Linux-based custom firmware on a user's router when he visits a malicious website.

Snell-Pym[^]:

Back when I were a lad, if you bought a computer, you'd bring it home and plug it into the telly and turn it on and a BASIC prompt would appear. Tough luck if you wanted to do practical tasks like word processing, but you could type a single command (such as CIRCLE 100,100,50) and be instantly treated to a circle appearing on the screen. Before long, my generation were writing programs to crunch numbers for our statistics homework, and lots and lots of games. And thus a generation of software engineers was born. Getting started in programming is trickier for the contemporary twenty-first-century child.

Mkyong.com[^]:

In *nix, you can use “find” command to find a file easily. Here are some tricks you can do with find to, er... find stuff all over the system.

Ayende @ Rahien[^]:

I got asked why RavenDB uses HTTP for transport, instead of TCP. Surely binary TCP would be more efficient to work with, right? Well, the answer it complex, but it boils down to this: Fiddler. Huh? What does Fiddler has to do with RavenDB transport mechanism? Quite a lot, actually. Using HTTP enable us to do a lot of amazing things...