The Insider News

Assembla[^]:

The original idea is great. It stands for releasing software frequently, with short lags for the implementation of valuable new features and ideas. The productivity of software development increases every year, and in theory you could use the word "agile" to describe many of the things that are light and bright, great and good, fast and fun about our new world. But, if we want to use the word “agile” for this, we have to burn off the stink of stagnation that surrounds the old “agile.” So, here are seven things I hate about “agile.”

NYC Resistor[^]:

While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested different stride widths and found that at 67 bytes (536 pixels across) there appeared to be some sort of image data that clearly was a picture of people. The rest of the image was skewed and distorted, so we knew that it wasn’t stored as an uncompressed bitmap. After some investigation, we were able to decode the scrambled mess above and turn it into the full image. Here's how we did it.

Windows 8 Secrets[^]:

As a reminder, Microsoft first provided a feature breakdown for the various Window 8 product editions back in April, in a post titled Announcing the Windows 8 Editions. As with similar Microsoft-produced tables for previous Windows versions, however, this this breakdown is woefully inadequate. So in Windows 8 Secrets, we provide a more detailed set of tables based on functional areas such as hardware capabilities, upgrade capabilities, Metro features, desktop features, and so on.

Nature[^]:

From e-mails to social networks, the digital traces left by life in the modern world are transforming social science. The emerging field of computational social science is attracting mathematically inclined scientists in ever-increasing numbers. This, in turn, is spurring the creation of academic departments and prompting companies such as the social-network giant Facebook, based in Menlo Park, California, to establish research teams to understand the structure of their networks and how information spreads across them.

NCZOnline[^]:

Long before Internet Explorer became the browser everyone loves to hate, it was the driving force of innovation on the Internet. Sometimes it’s hard to remember all of the good that Internet Explorer did before Internet Explorer 6 became the scourge of web developers everywhere. Believe it or not, Internet Explorer 4-6 is heavily responsible for web development as we know it today. A number of proprietary features became de facto standards and then official standards with some ending up in the HTML5 specification. It may be hard to believe that Internet Explorer is actually to thank for a lot of the features that we take for granted today, but a quick walk through history shows that it’s true.

Cobalt Sign[^]:

Microsoft rolled out – in the last couple of weeks – the new web UI (formerly known as METRO UI) for Hotmail (now called Outlook), SkyDrive, Office Web Apps, People and Account. The rest of the Windows Live suite is probably also due to be updated soon. The web UI is very similiar to the one found on Windows 8. You can see the new tiles of each service in the cover photo of this post. But now let’s get straight to the web apps.

adafruit industries blog[^]:

The memo, distributed to the senior technical staff, contained a ballot asking them to choose a name for a new device invented the previous winter – the semiconductor triode. Several options were presented, including my personal favorite, the Iotatron. In the end, the name “transistor” (“transconductance” + “varistor”) won out over all the others, but it’s still interesting to read the discussion of the other names.

InfoAdvisors' Blog[^]:

I’m asked do these sorts of “make a recommendation for a solution” presentations all the time. I know how difficult it is. These presentations are different than teaching moments. They need to have a certain structure...

Ars Technica[^]:

The average Web user maintains 25 separate accounts but uses just 6.5 passwords to protect them, according to a landmark study from 2007. As the Gawker breach demonstrated, such password reuse, combined with the frequent use of e-mail addresses as user names, means that once hackers have plucked login credentials from one site, they often have the means to compromise dozens of other accounts, too. Newer hardware and modern techniques have also helped to contribute to the rise in password cracking.

Rogueleaderr[^]:

The solution? Create a (mostly free) micro server on Amazon’s EC2 cloud and use it as a “poor man’s VPN” by routing all traffic from your laptop through the server and from there out onto the internet. The worked marvelously on the Boston guest wifi, and as I’m writing this it’s letting me connect to EC2 servers via SSH on a Southwest flight. This is easier than it sounds to set up, provided you have directions. So…here you go!

Computer History Vignettes[^]:

As we've shifted from thousands to hundreds of millions of computer users, much history is lost. Few realize that the backslash character did not exist in much text usage prior to 1961, and in no computer until 1958. A paper by Eric Fischer, submitted to the Annals of the History of Computing in early 2000 (and not yet published), unearthed a backslash on the keyboard of the Teletype Wheatstone Perforator, circa 1937-1945. But this was unknown to data processing people, who were stuck even up to the FORTRAN era (beginning 1955) with the Hollerith punch card code. Here is the story for the record.

Mailinator(tm) Blog[^]:

There is another technological shift conspiring against many web frameworks that isn't focused on performance, but instead focused on "ease of use" - which in many cases may hit far closer to home. That shift is the reorganization of MVC.... What thousands and thousands of Rails developers discovered upon moving to backbone is that they no longer needed their fancy template views. Their backend became a system that pushed JSON over HTTP. Very clean and very simple.