The Insider News

Mason Smith - This Animated Life[^]:

No, literally. Pixar's lighting/rendering systems were completely redone for their new film Monsters University. In my correspondence with Chris, who studied Visualization at A&M and works in the Rendering dept at Pixar (see my interview with Chris about his work on Brave here) he mentioned his work on MU...

Scott Hanselman[^]:

Chocolately is a bootstrapper that uses PowerShell scripts and the NuGet packaging format to install apps for you. NuGet is the package management system that Windows Developers use to bring libraries down at the project level. Chocolatey (get it? Chocolatey Nu-Get?) extends that concept to bring applications down at the system level.

.NET Slave[^]:

When coding, I use both of my hands for typing and both my eyes fixed on the code I’m writing. When I don’t know a certain keyboard shortcut, I reach for the mouse and in doing so, look away from the main Visual Studio window. My hands stop typing. I’m not productive anymore. For me, being productive is the foundation of my developer happiness.... So why not try to increase our IO using sound? What if we could hear when the build brakes? What if we, using our voice, could tell our editor to format the document in case we forgot that keyboard shortcut? It seems like a perfectly reasonable idea to me. To experiment with this idea, I wrote two extensions for Visual Studio 2012.

8th Light[^]:

From a software development perspective, we use katas to build muscle memory, practice logical thought and teach ourselves familiar ideas but from a different perspective. Katas can stretch our abilities and, similar to how a kata would teach a martial artist to become comfortable with the uncomfortable, they help us write code we may not normally write.... Although katas are typically practiced in a private setting, at 8th Light we often perform katas, once perfected, live in front of an audience of peers. The goal of the kata performance, in this instance, is not to be considered a rite of passage or to demonstrate mastery of the material. Instead, as its name implies, it is simply a performance meant to entertain.

Ars Technica[^]:

In March, readers followed along as Nate Anderson, Ars deputy editor and a self-admitted newbie to password cracking, downloaded a list of more than 16,000 cryptographically hashed passcodes. Within a few hours, he deciphered almost half of them. The moral of the story: if a reporter with zero training in the ancient art of password cracking can achieve such results, imagine what more seasoned attackers can do. Imagine no more. We asked three cracking experts to attack the same list Anderson targeted and recount the results in all their color and technical detail Iron Chef style.

John Geer[^]:

These “small data” situations are actually pretty important. Every post has its first few votes, every website its first few visitors, and most businesses their first customers, but not all of them continue long enough to get lots of data. Even in very large data sets, say visitors to a search engine, specific situations often have small amounts of data, like the probability that a visitor searching for “an image of a hippopotamus on a hill at sunset” will be pleased with the results. Each individual small data situation may not matter much. However, there are tons of these situations. Together they matter.