The Insider News

Wired.com[^]:

Don Stookey knew he had botched the experiment. One day in 1952, the Corning Glass Works chemist placed a sample of photosensitive glass inside a furnace and set the temperature to 600 degrees Celsius. At some point during the run, a faulty controller let the temperature climb to 900 degrees C. Expecting a melted blob of glass and a ruined furnace, Stookey opened the door to discover that, weirdly, his lithium silicate had transformed into a milky white plate. When he tried to remove it, the sample slipped from the tongs and crashed to the floor. Instead of shattering, it bounced.

Meeting C++[^]:

One thing, I wanted to write about for sometime, is how different the views on C++ are within the C++ community. That even as we have a single standard, still there are parallel worlds using the language very differently. But instead of worlds, I'd like to refer to the term Islands, as we all live in same ocean of C++.

Creative Bloq[^]:

In the last few years mobile has exploded, but knowing what to do and where to start can be tricky. Mobile website design is not just a question of a mobile site or an app - there are a range of options in between and aspects to take into account. To help you out, we have gathered together 20 top tips on what to consider when defining your mobile strategy and designing for mobile.

Typblography[^]:

As a font developer, I spend a good chunk of each day coding in a text editor and reading output messages from a terminal window, so I can appreciate the importance of a good monospaced font. Of course there is no technical limitation to using monospaced fonts when coding, but it is a very useful convention. When the Brackets team reached out to us on the Adobe type team, asking if we could develop a coding font for their open source application, we thought it made sense to adapt Source Sans, which I was working on at the time. Personally, I felt that I could use this opportunity to create a coding font that I would want to use myself.

IT Discover[^]:

A good collection of Free online programming books, tutorials and resources for C, C++, C#.

filipekberg.se[^]:

I often get the questions or enter discussions where the topic is: What is the difference between doing this and that in C#? It is not always that easy spotting the difference between code samples. I’m not referring to the actual code you have in Visual Studio, but the code that will be executed, or the IL produced when you compile.

BitRoar[^]:

Today, fancy websites from late 90s are universally considered amateurish. Flash, even though it still has some proponents, also mostly fallen out of grace. Yet, the (supposedly) cutting edge technologies in web development today look like the third iteration of the same bad ideas...

chrisfenton.com[^]:

I was poking around the internet one day looking for a Cray emulator and came up dry, so I decided to do something about it. Luckily, the Cray-1 hardware reference manual turned out to be useful enough that implementing most of this was pretty straightforward. The Cray-1 is one of those iconic machines that just makes you say “Now that‘s a super computer!” Sure, your iPhone is 10X faster, and it’s completely useless to own one, but admit it . . you really want one, don’t you?

John Skinner[^]:

When doing the new website for the Sublime Text 2.0 launch, instead of just screenshots, I wanted to have animations to demonstrate some of its features. One of the criteria was that the animations should work everywhere, from IE6 to an iPad. I wrote a small Python script that takes a collection of PNG frames as input, and emits a single packed PNG file as output, which contains all the differences between the frames, and some JSON meta-data specifying which bits of the packed PNG file correspond to each frame. JavaScript turns the PNG and JSON into an animation, using either the canvas element, or emulating it using overlaid div elements for older browsers.

ironfroggy.com[^]:

The energy attracted to a small subset of the Python-verse has benefited the community as a whole. However, The energy is shifting. Browsers are evolving. Computer sales are getting matched and surpassed by tablet and smartphones. We're building things we'd never before imagined possible to carry in our pockets or to pull up without so much as a setup.exe to run first. These are both great directions for software as a whole, but I'm worried Python is going to miss out!

PCWorld[^]:

Futuristic technology was given a platform in "The Jetsons." Now, the cartoon that made you smile and dream of what could be has turned 50. While we don’t yet have flying cars with bubble glass transporting people around, robots that walk and talk and so-called “roadable aircraft” do exist. Here's what else made it off the screen and into reality.

Exploring Local[^]:

Perhaps the most egregious error is that Apple’s team relied on quality control by algorithm and not a process partially vetted by informed human analysis. You cannot read about the errors in Apple Maps without realizing that these maps were being visually examined and used for the first time by Apple’s customers and not by Apple’s QC teams. If Apple thought that the results were going to be any different than they are, I would be surprised. Of course, hubris is a powerful emotion.

ROSEdu Techblog[^]:

This guide is designed to explain why you need to hide information and how can you do this when you do not trust the channel through which messages are conveyed. We will discuss about cryptographic system, encryption, decryption, one-way function, asymmetric keys and more. You may think of cryptography as the thing that keeps you untouchable inside of a soap bubble travelling by air around the world.

Jacques Mattheij[^]:

In 2002 or so a company called Acacia contacted our Toronto offices to discuss a license deal so that they wouldn’t have to sue us for violation of their patent filed in 1992 detailing digital video transmission over telephone lines. I don’t think I’ve ever been as angry as on that particular day. After regaining my normal sunny composure I went through the patent, read all the claims and realized they didn’t have a leg to stand on. In fact, I thought that their patent was a typical case of one that should have never been awarded in the first place. I most definitely wasn’t aware of the patent until they contacted me and I had a pretty good log of the way the original program was developed, complete with date-and-timestamps.

ShellJS[^]:

ShellJS is a portable (Windows included) implementation of Unix shell commands on top of the Node.js API. You can use it to eliminate your shell script's dependency on Unix while still keeping its familiar and powerful commands. You can also install it globally so you can run it from outside Node projects - say goodbye to those gnarly Bash scripts!

Hanselminutes Technology Podcast[^]:

Scott talks to Mark Powell, Senior Software Engineer at Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Mark has worked on three Mars lander missions, most recently supporting Curiosity. Mark lives on Mars Time. What's it like to write software that helps us talk to robots on that are on FREAKING MARS?

Grantland[^]:

Gadgetry of any sort has a rocky history in chess. In the late 18th century, for example, a Hungarian engineer named Wolfgang von Kempelen toured Europe with a machine called The Turk, which he promoted as a mechanical chess master. Legend holds that Napoleon and Ben Franklin are among the chess aficionados who lost to Kempelen's brainchild. Decades after those big wins, word got out that The Turk, which Kempelen built to woo Empress Maria Theresa Walburga Amalia Christina of Austria, was a royal scam: For all its pulleys and wheels, Kempelen always made sure an accomplished and totally human chess player was hiding inside the machine, making all the right moves.