The Insider News

Agile Blog[^]:

You would think that, once we master space exploration and how to replicate the perfect cup of Earl Grey, everyone in the future according to Star Trek would understand the necessity for unique, strong passwords. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. And no, as we’ll see later, biometrics don’t seem to help.

Jeffrey Zeldman Presents The Daily Report[^]:

I CAME to AdobeMAX in Los Angeles to give a talk to a room full of designers. Before arriving, I thought of Adobe as a historically important 20th century company that was slowly leaking relevance—a company web designers in the era of responsive design have begun to think of with a combination of fondness and embarrassment, like a beloved but somewhat shameful old uncle. I came to LA with those perceptions, but I leave with the impression of an exciting 21st century company in emergence.

TechRadar[^]:

After a decade of looking for the "year of the Linux desktop", many Linux columnists have given up. Some say it isn't coming, while others claim that Linux has simply failed on the desktop. If we responded to everyone who has ever criticised the Linux desktop, we wouldn't get any work done. But Miguel de Icaza isn't just anybody. He's well respected in the open source community as the founding developer of one of the two main Linux desktop environments, the Gnome desktop. To our utter amazement, even he now thinks the Linux desktop is dead!

Hey everyone, Erik here posting for Intel. We’d like to invite you all to participate in the second phase of the Perceptual Computing Challenge.

In addition to wanting to see more use of gesture, voice, and facial recognition in today’s software, Intel is also looking for that one big idea that will change the way people interact with their PCs.  And they are putting their money where their mouth is: With a grand-prize of $100,000 USD and thousands of dollars more in prizing available in 4 different categories, this is not one to miss.

Think you’ve got what it takes to inspire others and ignite the computing market with an innovative new concept? You’ve got six weeks to submit ideas for games, productivity tools, user interfaces, generally innovative uses of the Perceptual Computing SDK. If your idea is outstanding it will be selected by the panel of judges to progress into round two, where you’ll receive an interactive gesture camera in order to turn the idea into reality.

Here are more details about the rules and prizes, as well as a link to see who won in the first phase of the competition:

    Competition home page and prize list: https://perceptualchallenge.intel.com
    Showcase of winners from phase one: http://software.intel.com/sites/campaigns/perceptualshowcase/

Good luck!

Ardalis[^]:

My opinions on comments in software code have evolved with my experience. When I was a teenager first learning to program for real, I rarely used comments unless the code was for an assignment, in which case it was a forced exercise every bit as much as teachers’ requests to “show your work” added verbosity to my math and science problems’ solutions. Of course, the programs themselves were quite simple, and the languages used (BASIC, Pascal) didn’t really support OOP (not that I knew what that was). And it was important, then, to be able to express the intent of the code in English, if only so the instructor knew what was being attempted. It wasn’t uncommon to receive partial credit for comments describing the approach one would take, not having had enough time to actually write the code itself.

Cello[^]:

The high level stucture of Cello projects is inspired by Haskell, while the syntax and semantics are inspired by Python and Obj-C. Cello isn't about Object Orientation in C, but I hope that with Cello I've turned C into something of a dynamic and powerful functional language which it may have once been. Although the syntax is pleasant, Cello isn't a library for beginners. It is for C power users, as manual memory management doesn't play nicely with many higher-order concepts. Most of all Cello is just a fun experiment to see what C would look like when Hacked to its limits.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us[^]:

My first breakout session at the SELA Developer Practice covered the most common attacks against web applications and how to defend against these attacks. When planning this talk, I knew 60 minutes are hardly enough to cover all common vulnerabilities -- especially if I wanted to show any demos -- so I decided to focus on the three most prevalent vulnerability types, according to the OWASP Top 10: Injection (command injection and SQL injection), Broken authentication or session management and Cross-site scripting (and CSRF as a bonus).

TildeHash[^]:

Firefox 20.0 -- and a couple earlier versions I think -- has a nifty little feature of its "Inspector" tool that allows you to view HTML elements as 3D objects. This lets you to graphically see the DOM structure and how elements lay against one another. As soon as the feature appeared I knew what I wanted to do with it, I wanted to use it for something it wasn't intended for: 3D Modeling.