The Insider News

Gregory Wieber[^]:

Now that iPad has a retina display, interfaces designed for the millions of new pixels will take up a lot more memory than before. If your app contains graphics for older generation iPads as well as the new, that's quickly going to add up. The result will be bloated app binaries. The problem will be worse for universal apps. It's going to mean that people downloading an app on their iTouch over a 3g network will have to download enormous iPad retina graphics that will never be of any use to them.

Coding the Architecture[^]:

Software architecture plays a pivotal role in the delivery of successful software yet it's frustratingly neglected by many teams. Whether performed by one person or shared amongst the team, the software architecture role exists on even the most agile of teams yet the balance of up front and evolutionary thinking often reflects aspiration rather than reality.

Maurits thinks aloud[^]:

Here is a collection of bad practices I have seen during many software development projects and some practical advice for acceptance testers on how to maximally help a software development team. I’m sure there are many more ways to improve the communication between testers and software developers. Don’t hesitate to share them!

Ray Wenderlich[^]:

It happens to the best of us: you’re working happily on your app and all is well, and then suddenly – POOF! – it crashes. Aaargh!! Fixing crashes doesn’t need to be hard. Here are some tips for finding the problem and correcting it. You’re likely to worsen the situation if you freak out and start changing things at random, hoping the bug will magically go away if only you utter the right incantations. Instead, you need to take a methodical approach and learn how to reason your way through a crash.

Jay Kreps[^]:

This was my reaction to the Scala macros proposal too. Not because there is anything necessarily bad about macros or the proposal, but just because—is this really the most critical thing? ... I think the Scala folks have done a good job of putting together something that is significantly better than Java as a language. It’s fast, concise, statically type-checked, and inherits a lot of the good operational properties of the JVM. But languages aren’t just, well, languages; and they aren’t even runtime environments for that matter. They are platforms and tool chains and libraries and bodies of documentation, and cultures, and practices. And here Scala does not yet do so well.

Hal's (Im)Perfect Vision[^]:

Now that the Windows 8 Consumer Preview has been picked apart the question I’m asking is how many more shoes are there left to drop? As we’ve all seen, the current Microsoft philosophy (particularly for the Windows group) is to only release information that needs to be released. I conclude there is still a lot we don’t know about Windows 8 and related products.

Chris Love[^]:

Adrian Kingsley-Hughes lists the things he finds wrong with Windows 8 and Jeff Ammons puts forth the common argument that Windows 8 will probably not work well in the enterprise. I can't disagree more with their positions because I think I am looking through a completely different set of lenses. A pair of lenses that looks forward, not backward.

Slate Magazine[^]:

In late 2009, Why the Lucky Stiff’s disappearance played out in real time on the Internet, as Rubyists noticed his projects had stopped loading and relayed the news on popular forums. It was not just one site or server, they fast realized. _why, his blog, his Twitter feed, and all of his open-source code had disappeared from the Internet, and all at once. Let's look at why _why's contributions continue to be important today.

Technology Review[^]:

The cloud is essentially a metaphor for a network of computers in which computational tasks and resources can be shared. The big idea here is that users simply rent the computing power, the storage or an application for as long as they need it without having to invest in the infrastructure behind it. That makes computing cheaper, easier and more efficient. There are well known problems of course...

Ars Technica[^]:

Passwords that contain multiple words aren't as resistant as some researchers expected to certain types of cracking attacks, mainly because users frequently pick phrases that occur regularly in everyday speech. A study by Bonneau and Shutova is among the first to examine passphrases used by real-world people to access accounts. While it concludes phrases are harder to guess, the increased entropy isn't enough to withstand offline attacks.