The Insider News

TechHive[^]:

Sony’s Open SmartWatch Project will make it possible for developers to create and install alternative software on the Sony SmartWatch.... Developers can already create apps for the SmartWatch, but with the Open SmartWatch project Sony is expanding the possibilities, according to a blog post on Thursday. Developers can take control of SmartWatch in new ways by creating and flashing their own alternative firmware. The project comes with a number of caveats. Consumers are strongly advised to keep the official tested and verified firmware, according to the blog post. Only developers completely sure of what they are doing should take part, it said.

jstorimer.com[^]:

The first time I heard mention of the GIL, it had nothing to do with how it worked, what it did, or why it existed. I only heard about that it was silly because it restricted parallelism or that it was great because it made my code thread-safe. In time, I've gotten more comfortable with multi-threaded programming, and realized that the world is more complicated than that. I wanted to know, at a deep technical level, how the GIL worked. Only, there's no specification for the GIL, and no documentation. It's essentially unspecified behaviour; an MRI implementation detail. The Ruby core team makes no promises about how it will work or what it guarantees.

Source: An OpenNews project[^]:

The word “visualization” once more readily described the act of creating a mental image in one’s mind, whereas today it’s far more likely to mean the graphical representation of information. We are living in an increasingly visual world, peering into screens of different sizes with incrementally superior resolutions at every device upgrade. We are also living in a world with more data available to us than ever before. IBM says that 90% of the world’s data was produced only in the last two years and that we produce 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily.

Paul Thurrotts WinInfo[^]:

The core issue might be that both Xbox One and Windows 8 represent bets on bigger, longer-term visions than today’s users aren't interested in hearing about, let alone dealing with day-to-day. But unlike with Windows 8, which is being retroactively “improved” with features that should have been there from the get-go, Microsoft still has a chance to “fix” Xbox One before it’s released. These fixes are easy to implement and should include...

The Next Web[^]:

Twitter has quietly opened up its various analytics tools to the public, giving everyone access to in-depth data about the people and brands who follow them, as well as the performance of their most recent tweets.... The Timeline activity displays a graph for the user based on the number of mentions, follows and unfollows that they’ve received over the last month. A detailed list underneath shows all of the user’s most recent tweets, including the number of times someone has favorited, retweeted or replied to it.

Binary Bonsai[^]:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs This quote was hauled out for the video presentation of this redesign, and I'm afraid I'm going to have to go ahead and wield it as a bit of a club. Because quite frankly it's talking the talk, but not quite walking the walk. It forgot the corollary to the quote, which is 'how it looks and feels informs the user how it works'.

Google Research Blog[^]:

This past October the state of the art seemed to move things a bit closer to toddler performance. A system which used deep learning and convolutional neural networks easily beat out more traditional approaches in the ImageNet computer vision competition designed to test image understanding.... We built and trained models similar to those from the winning team using software infrastructure for training large-scale neural networks developed at Google in a group started by Jeff Dean and Andrew Ng. When we evaluated these models, we were impressed; on our test set we saw double the average precision when compared to other approaches we had tried. We knew we had found what we needed to make photo searching easier for people using Google.

If You Don't Start You Won't Finish
The honest truth of the matter is though, if I don’t start, it won’t get done – unlike the story about the Shoemaker and the Elves, they are not coming to clean my house each day!

This of course is a very simple example, but I find this reminder useful even at work.

Dream.In.Code[^]:

So in a role-reversal from last gen, it's looking increasingly as though Sony are the champion of indie game development. We don't yet know the process for sign-up, but the current rumor (according to neogaf) is that PSM (playstation mobile) games will be compatible with the indie games platform on PS4. Adding some weight to that argument is the recent announcement that dualshock 3 support has been added to PSM. Also keep in mind that both Transistor (Super Giant Games) and Mercenary Kings - two games announced as part of PS4's initial indie offering - were written in C# and use Monogame (the open source version of XNA) for their Steam/PC releases.

David Nolen[^]:

In this post I want to talk about my port of Notch’s beautiful Minecraft JavaScript demo to ClojureScript. When I say beautiful I’m not referring to the code - frankly it’s ugly. And being a faithful port the ClojureScript version ain’t much prettier. But this post isn’t about writing beautiful code, it’s about ClojureScript’s suitability for computationally intensive interactive applications.

Software Engineering Candies[^]:

This article describes how to pretend working hard as a software engineer. You may have two completely different motivations to pretend to work hard: First, you are just a lazy bastard – trying to get money for nothing. If you are in this category, you are out of respect for your co-workers. Please, stop reading now. All this is not for your ears! Second, you have too much to do in your daily work and you need more time to think and learn.... We are humans and we need room to follow own ideas, lean something new, recreate or just getting better developers. If you are in this second category, you may read the following tips to prevent you from too much work.

Improbable Truths[^]:

When I began working in software, I tied my sense of accomplishment to the stuff I was able to do. I used to get a huge feeling of satisfaction from a weekend spent working on a clever hack. I would spend serious effort making something run twice as quickly, even when there wasn't a problem with how quickly it was running in the first place. Meeting those types of challenges was my primary motivator. Now, in a leadership position on a talented team, I find myself just as much in the business of avoiding writing code as I am in writing it.

Wired.com[^]:

In the never-ending arms race between secret-keepers and code-breakers, the laws of quantum mechanics seemed to have the potential to give secret-keepers the upper hand. A technique called quantum cryptography can, in principle, allow you to encrypt a message in such a way that it would never be read by anyone whose eyes it isn’t for. Enter cold, hard reality. In recent years, methods that were once thought to be fundamentally unbreakable have been shown to be anything but. Because of machine errors and other quirks, even quantum cryptography has its limits.

Dr Dobb's[^]:

The U.S. government's admission this week that it has been engaged in large-scale collection of data on private citizens' activities was a revelation that brought considerable response from all points on the political spectrum. As there are already plenty of commentators extemporizing on the political and social implications of the news, let me focus on the technological implications, which I expect will be significant. The first and most profound effect will be a serious reconsideration of the wisdom of putting data into the public cloud.

catwig.com[^]:

We eagerly brought Glass back to the lab to begin the dissection. Speculation reigned: what if the entire body of Glass is potted with epoxy requiring strong solvents to access? Which part is the battery in? How hackable is this thing? Where are the sensors? Any extra hardware features yet to be unlocked by future software updates? But first, where to even begin opening it? With no idea of what lay ahead, we started by removing the titanium frame from the pod that holds all the good stuff.

Felipe Contreras[^]:

In my opinion the main problem with GNOME is not just the code, code can be fixed, but the attitude from the developers (which is reflected in the code), and as users made it clear in the survey. Many open source projects would kill to have the user-base GNOME had, and welcome their input with open arms, but GNOME neglected their users, they thought they were irrelevant, and they tried to dismiss their complaints with typical defenses, which of course don’t make sense.