The Insider News

Jerry Nixon[^]:

New browsers introduce new ways of thinking. IE10 is no different. There are compatibility concerns to make your site look awesome everywhere. So where do you start to learn about this stuff? How about right here!

The Atlantic[^]:

Randall Munroe began his career in physics working with robots at NASA's Langley Research Center. He is famous, however, for engineering a creation of different kind: the iconic web comic that is xkcd. Last week, Munroe won the web's wonder for approximately the thousandth time when he published comic #1110, "Click and Drag," a soaring, spanning, surprising work that encouraged users to explore a fanciful world through their computer screens. As Rev Dan Catt pointed out, if you printed the comic at 300dpi, the resulting image would be about 46 feet wide.

The MOApp weblog[^]:

From Xerox Star to OS X Lion, here's a sample of the evolution of scrollbars on your screen.

The Code Project[^]:

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews in which we talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves.

Learnable Programming[^]:

The goals of a programming system should be: 1. to support and encourage powerful ways of thinking, and 2. to enable programmers to see and understand the execution of their programs. A live-coding Processing environment addresses neither of these goals. JavaScript and Processing are poorly-designed languages that support weak ways of thinking, and ignore decades of learning about learning. And live coding, as a standalone feature, is worthless.

leebutterman.com[^]:

The ultimate goal is to take a passphrase, tokenize it into individual words, and find low-entropy words in increasingly-long contexts (0th order Markov model, 1st order, 2nd order), using completely local data sources. The front end is a straightforward Backbone.js GUI. Those models and views rely on querying for the existence of 1-grams, 2-grams, and 3-grams in pre-loaded data structures. The backend needs knowledge of roughly 10 million 2-grams and roughly 40 million 3-grams.

wpcentral[^]:

We managed to finally get our hands on the finalized (or very near finalized) software development kit (SDK) for Windows Phone 8--the one where only select developers were given access too. The SDK had surfaced on the internet a few days ago via WinUnleaked and has been floating around ever since. After spending a few hours configuring our PC for the SDK (you need Windows 8 Pro RTM 64-bit, seriously), we fired up Windows Phone 8 OS...

Channel 9[^]:

Christian Schormann - responsible for the design of Blend, Microsoft’s visual authoring tool for UX - talks about Expression Blend’s support for building Windows Store apps using XAML and HTML. With HTML being the new offering, Christian dives deep into the HTML and CSS features.

Mental Floss[^]:

When I was a kid with a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), sometimes my games wouldn’t load. But I, like all kids, knew the secret: take out the game cartridge, blow on the contacts, and put it back in. And it seemed to work. (When it failed, I’d just keep trying until it worked.) But looking back, did blowing into the cartridge really help? I’ve talked to the experts, reviewed a study on this very topic, and have the answer. But first, let’s talk tech.

AllThingsD[^]:

Getting Web video off your PC and onto your plasma screen used to be a niche activity. No more: Consumer-tracking service NPD says TV sets are now the most popular way to watch streaming video. NPD says 45 percent of consumers report that TV is now their primary Web video screen, up from 33 percent last year. It basically swapped places with the PC...

Pawel Brodzinski[^]:

better code often means less code. I don’t think about lines of code exactly, or something similarly stupid, but in terms of meaningful code. However, argument for less code isn’t about making code as compact as possible, avoid redundancy, etc. The argument is about not writing code at all whenever reasonable or possible. Should we focus on deciding what should and what should not built instead of polishing our software development craft then?

TechHive[^]:

The build I saw this week was still very much under development, but it looked good and seemed to be relatively bug free. RIM is really pulling out all of the stops for BlackBerry 10, though I worry that waiting until 2013 to release the update may end up killing the OS before it even has a chance to come to market. The smartphone industry moves at an incredible pace...

Ars Technica[^]:

The backdoor contains code that allows remote attackers to take control of the underlying server running the modified phpMyAdmin, which is a Web-based tool for managing MySQL databases. The PHP script is found in a file named server_sync.php, and it reads PHP code embedded in standard POST Web requests and then executes it. That allows anyone who knows the backdoor is present to execute code of his choice. HD Moore, CSO of Rapid7 and chief architect of the Metasploit exploit package for penetration testers and hackers, told Ars a module has already been added that tests for the vulnerability.

The Next Web[^]:

Thus, for Windows 8 to break the five-figure app threshold – in a world in which it’s six figures or bust – by launch, the operating system must undergo a massive burst of developer release before its debut. However, looking at the above chart, the Windows Store is growing by under 100 apps per day. Thus, at its current rate, given the time until Windows 8 becomes generally available, we can expect around 5,000 apps to populate its virtual shelves. Remember, however, that not all will be available in all places. Thus, under 5,000 apps for everyone.