The Insider News

Folklore.org[^]:

In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week.

Dr Dobb's[^]:

In the last five years, LLVM has evolved from an academic project to the universal back-end of C, C++, and Objective C compilers. The key to its success is its performance and adaptability, both of which derive from its unique design and implementation.

RT[^]:

Flame may be the most powerful computer virus in history, and a nation-state is most likely to blame for unleashing it on the World Wide Web. Kaspersky's chief malware expert Vitaly Kamlyuk shared with RT the ins and outs of Stuxnet on steroids.

Smashing Magazine[^]:

In the startup community there is a term called minimum viable product. I’m coining the term Minimum Usable Design, and that is when you reach your 50% mark for your design. If you can’t use your design after you have reached 50% (or a person can’t understand at least 50% of what is going on) then you haven’t reached the 50% mark yet. By no means does this imply that you should show your design to the public at the 50% mark, but you can use it as a way to gauge your progress.

TechHive[^]:

There are many, many styluses for the iPad out there. I know, because I’ve looked at a lot of them, putting together reviews (and drawings) for nearly three dozen pens and writing implements for tablets and handling even more. But even the most extensive chart doesn’t always get to the heart of the question that tablet owners want to know: Which stylus is well-suited for what I want to do?

Co.Design[^]:

Tom Hobbs argues that UI designers need to stop aping real-life bookshelves and suede calendars like Apple does, and go for a new philosophy: just enough is more.

Craig Mod[^]:

I spent a few weeks reformatting and publishing four of my longer essays on the Kindle Direct Publishing platform. The process was a hodge-podge of snippets and trial and error. I wish I had this template from the start. Now I do. So I hope it helps you.

Shawn Wildermuth[^]:

As a C# guy I am comfortable with the idea of 'this' in the scope of a class (or 'Me' for your VB'ers). It's a relatively simple idea that allows you to access the instance of the class that you're a part of to call members. In JavaScript that have a similar idea but because of the nature of JavaScript it can cause some odd behavior.

ZDNet[^]:

Microsoft is increasingly warming to open source. Not only is the company increasingly publishing open-source projects of its own, it’s also developing major parts of its web/cloud infrastructure in the open and is also supporting a variety of external open-source projects. This is great news, but it’s taken a long time and a considerable amount of hard work and damage-repair to make it happen.

Geek Out of Water - Gil Zilberfeld's Ramblings[^]:

What we do is set deadlines. Some of the deadlines are real – like a tradeshow we need the product for. Some are there because someone just put a date on the table. Once we have a deadline, we’re starting our way towards the goal.

Ray Wenderlich[^]:

The goal of this tutorial is to give you confidence with some of the basics of Objective-C. Instead of taking a “let’s explain every piece of syntax” approach, we’re going to take the approach of diving right in and giving you some hands-on experience and an example to work from. It will then be a lot easier for you to consult a reference when necessary moving forward.

Rodney Rehm[^]:

A couple of weeks ago it seemed my daily business became sorting DOMElements. This quickly became boring enough to be investigated more thoroughly. So this post sums up everything you should know about sorting DOMElements in Javascript (… using jQuery, of course).

Smore[^]:

Our research shows that people love two things: failed Microsoft technologies and obscure Javascript libraries. Naturally, we decided to combine the two. Clippy.js is a full Javascript implementation of Microsoft Agent (AKA Clippy and friends), ready to be embedded in any website.

Ars Technica[^]:

America's broadband strategy isn't working very well. Unfortunately, it's not clear how to fix it. The experiences of other nations can yield useful insights, but such examples only get us so far. Still, the first step to fixing the American broadband policy is to admit that we have a problem. And I now admit it.

John V. Petersen[^]:

Bottom line, the issue has more to do with business, the business of computing and less do with the technical aspects of computing.

Scott Hanselman[^]:

I like hearing stories about how people got into computers and programming. Perhaps if I blog my story, you'll share yours.

Mobile Opportunity[^]:

My conclusion is that Windows 8 in its current form is very different; attractive in some ways, and disturbing in others. It combines an interesting new interface with baffling changes to Windows compatibility, and amateur mistakes in customer messaging. Add up all the changes, and I am very worried that Microsoft may be about to shoot itself in the foot spectacularly.

Phoronix[^]:

Last week I wrote that the open-source graphics card is dead. The developer behind Project VGA has now written a lengthy email to me to explain why the open-source graphics card is no more.

High Scalability[^]:

Web crawlers have been around as long as the Web has -- and before the web, there were crawlers for gopher and ftp. You would think that 25 years of experience would render crawling a solved problem, but the vast growth of the web and new inventions in the technology of webspam and other unsavory content results in a constant supply of new challenges.