The Insider News

Shawn Wildermuth[^]:

In the last couple of years, I've been adding the HTML/JS/CSS skillset to my stack of required skills and my talks and courses have reflected that change. To my readers who are deep in the XAML stack, this change seems to have come at somewhat a shock to many. I've even been accused by some of abandoning the Silverlight, WPF, Win8, WinPhone folks. This has caused me a lot of frustration because I don't believe that developers can or should only know one possible stack. To reach the full breadth of users, sometimes you need to be able to develop across the ecosystems.

Development With A Dot[^]:

Some time ago, I compared NHibernate and Entity Framework. It was from a very technical point of view, and I think it is still up to date. Today, I want to talk about the current state of things, from a less technical stand. First, let me just say the obvious: NHibernate originated and is driven by the community, while Entity Framework is a Microsoft product. This makes all the difference in the world.

Big-O Cheat Sheet[^]:

Hi there! This webpage covers the space and time Big-O complexities of common algorithms used in Computer Science. When preparing for technical interviews in the past, I found myself spending hours crawling the internet putting together the best, average, and worst case complexities for search and sorting algorithms so that I wouldn't be stumped when asked about them.

themodernscientist[^]:

My research is focused on biomolecular NMR and, as such, often involves transferring resonance assignments from one multidimensional NMR spectrum to another. In theory this should be a simple task, but it can be extremely time consuming due to small variations in the sample used to acquire the data or in the way the data were acquired. The good news, however, is that it is possible to automate this process using an optimization.... The transfer of resonance assignments is different in that individual resonances are either matched with each other or not. The transformation from one set of data onto another is effectively discrete (more specifically, it is binary). This type of optimization is known as “binary integer programming.”

ZDNet[^]:

The Start button is back. But that's just one of a very long list of changes you'll find in Windows 8.1, which will be available as a preview in a few weeks and will be released before the end of the year. Don't let the name or the price tag (free) fool you: this is a major update. Here's what's inside.

AnandTech[^]:

There’s a saying dating back to the early MS-DOS days: “Wait for the point release.” The implication was that the x.0 version of any new MS-DOS was sure to have problems (if you were around at the time, 2.0 and 3.0 certainly had some issues), and you should wait for the inevitable x.1 update before upgrading. That attitude later changed to “wait for the first Service Pack” when we moved to Windows 95 and NT, and while there have been occasions where things more or less worked as expected, there are still many users—and even more businesses—who hold off on upgrading to a new Microsoft OS until it’s been out in the wild for a while.

The Register[^]:

Microsoft is plugging its security intelligence systems into Azure so that service providers and local authorities can get near-realtime information on botnets and malware detected by Redmond. The new Windows Azure-based Cyber Threat Intelligence Program (C-TIP) was unveiled on Tuesday by Microsoft as an extension of its crime-busting Microsoft Active Response for Security (MARS) program. C-TIP will let ISPs and Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERTS) get a direct link between their servers and Windows Azure to ingest near-realtime data on malware-infected computers tracked by Microsoft.

AllThingsD[^]:

Mary Meeker’s annual Internet trends report is out; you can read the full 2013 edition here. Not up for 120 slides? Here’s my pull of the best ones, with a focus on the data-heavy charts and graphs. Mobile continues to be the biggest trend in the deck, by far. And that extends to people living their lives online and documenting them as they go — just look at the growth of shared photos. But last year’s theme was the mobile monetization gap, and it still exists.

Embedded in Academia[^]:

The large number of coursework-only MS degrees that we are collectively granting is eroding whatever prestige and credentialing value was previously associated with an MS. To put it bluntly, people have caught on.... The thesis is that job applicants with MS degrees are often weaker than those with BS degrees. I see similar effects here at Utah where I’m often the instructor for a mixed graduate and undergraduate operating systems course. The best MS students and the best undergrads are extremely strong. However, the median-quality MS student is weaker than the median-quality undergrad. A lot of this is caused by the MS students who don’t have a CS background: they simply are not ready for a serious upper-division CS class.

Troy Hunt[^]:

There’s this debate that goes round and round about a process that’s commonly known as responsible disclosure or in other words, notifying the owner of a system that their security sucks and giving them the opportunity to fix it rather than telling the great unwashed masses and letting them have at a vulnerable system. The theory goes that responsible disclosure is the ethical thing to do whilst airing website security dirty laundry publicly makes you an irresponsible cowboy, or something to that effect.

deskthority[^]:

When I became interested in alternate keyboard layouts about 3 years ago and researched possible more ergonomic alternatives, I also stumbled upon geekhack and was immediately drawn to the idea of starting my learning process with a new keyboard, which of course had to have mechanical switches.... Finally, when I had realized how much the custom layout - by now I had switched to AdNW - was making my day job as software developer more comfortable I decided to also get a better input device, and in lack of any interesting and affordable alternatives was soon tempted to build one myself...

Peter Gillard-Moss[^]:

Ask a room of developers what they’d do to help diagnose a live bug in their app. Most of them would say ‘add some logging’. Ask them how and they’d reply ‘use log4x to write to a log file’. They’d write some text out to a disk. There’s your problem. What only a very few would say is add some monitoring. Rather than write out a line to a file that says ‘Connecting to the database’ they’d record a key value pair for active database connections. Rather than writing out ‘Home page requested’ they’d prefer a meaningful data structure detailing the request received.