The Insider News

don't code today what you can't debug tomorrow[^]:

An issue tracker is a valuable asset for any serious software development. Beside serving as a bug database, the tracker can be easily leveraged for technical discussion. GitHub, a popular code hosting service, provides a basic issue tracking system. How does it compare against another established player, Google Code Project Hosting?

Los Techies[^]:

I often hear people say something like “if you need it once, build it. If you need it twice, abstract it.” People often say then in the context of the “DRY” – or Don’t Repeat Yourself – principle. In theory this sounds great because you’re removing duplication in your code. This falls apart pretty quickly in a lot of circumstances, though. The idea of DRY needs to be tempered with YAGNI – “You Aint Gonna Need It“. With that, we end up with The Rule Of Three, and it clearly says that code can be copied once but the third time you need it, you should abstract it.

Oliver Steele[^]:

The developer world is divided into two camps. Language mavens wax rhapsodic about the power of higher-level programming — first-class functions, staged programming, AOP, MOPs, and reflection. Tool mavens are skilled at the use of integrated build and debug tools, integrated documentation, code completion, refactoring, and code comprehension. Language mavens tend to use a text editor such as emacs or vim — these editors are more likely to work for new languages. Tool mavens tend to use IDEs such as Visual Studio, Eclipse, or IntelliJ, that integrate a variety of development tools.

Inside Microsoft Research[^]:

The TouchDevelop web app, which requires Internet Explorer 10, enables developers to publish their scripts so they can be shared with others using TouchDevelop. As with the Windows Phone version, a touchdevelop.com cloud service enables scripts to be published and queried, and when you log in with the same credentials, all of your scripts are synchronized between all your platforms and devices.

Ars Technica[^]:

Apollo Flight Controller 101: Every console explained
Mission Operations Control Room 2 was used for almost every Gemini and Apollo flight, and in the late 1990s was restored to its Apollo-era appearance. You can visit it if you're in Houston, but you won't get any closer than the glassed-in visitor gallery in the back, and that's just not close enough. Strap yourselves in and prepare for an up-close look at the MOCR consoles, Ars style.

MIT Technology Review[^]:

Powering cellular base stations around the world will cost $36 billion this year—chewing through nearly 1 percent of all global electricity production. Much of this is wasted by a grossly inefficient piece of hardware: the power amplifier, a gadget that turns electricity into radio signals. The versions of amplifiers within smartphones suffer similar problems. If you’ve noticed your phone getting warm and rapidly draining the battery when streaming video or sending large files, blame the power amplifiers. As with the versions in base stations, these chips waste more than 65 percent of their energy—and that’s why you sometimes need to charge your phone twice a day.

wynnnetherland.com[^]:

Color has its uses beyond the text editor.Good syntax highlighting employs both contrast and meaning. Type names, string values, and delimiters are given different weight or color treatment from the rest of the code. As with any good thing, moderation is the key to colorizing. Call out what's important, aim for readability.

Nick's Blog[^]:

Building a microcontroller or CPU out of discrete logic is a popular hobbyist pursuit, and it serves a useful purpose: building a CPU from scratch teaches you a lot about CPU architecture and tradeoffs; it's an interesting and instructive exercise. So, I wondered, wouldn't building an FPGA out of discrete logic be similarly educational? Hence, my competition entry: an FPGA (or rather, a 'slice' of one) built entirely out of discrete logic chips.

raganwald's posterous[^]:

I think Alan Kay has some insight into programming. His suggestion is that programming is a Pop Culture, because it spreads much, much faster than education and formal study spreads. The programming language BASIC became popular because Dartmouth had it on a computer system, and General Electric franchised that system. Once it spread “in the wild,” it became popular because it was popular. Many things in programming are like that.

The Code Project[^]:

Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews.

The Visual Studio Blog[^]:

It gives us great pleasure to announce that today at //build/ we launched the Windows Phone 8 development story. We have enhanced the existing Visual Studio 2012 developer tools to support development of Windows Phone 8 apps optimized for a variety of resolutions and hardware, introduced ability to simulate and monitor the impact of real life conditions on app quality and also enabled native C++ app development.

.NET Blog[^]:

Today, we are happy to announce the availability of .NET for Windows Phone 8 and the Windows Phone SDK 8.0! We have made major updates to the .NET Framework runtime and code generation process that have resulted in startup time improvements as high as 50%. We have also included the new async programming model from .NET Framework 4.5 and the world-class garbage collector in the CoreCLR for better app responsiveness. Your customers will enjoy the big improvements that they see in your app running on Windows Phone 8.

Patrick Smacchia[^]:

In my consultant career, no matter the kind of company I visited, from the tiny startup to the largest fortune 500 corporation, they all have in common to be entangled in spaghetti. Spaghetti means poorly structured code. Spaghetti means high maintenance and evolution cost. Spaghetti means frustration, friction and lack of motivation for everyone in the team. And often, spaghetti means project failure.

Preshing on Programming[^]:

It turns out that the optimal encoding strategy is arithmetic coding. For those who don’t already recognize it, this turns out to be a Huffman encoding tree. Huffman coding is really just a special case of arithmetic coding. But before jumping into that, let’s first take a look at an alternate encoding strategy which requires a bit more memory than we’re allowed, but is much easier to understand. This alternate coding also has a few similarities to the arithmetic coding implementation I wrote, so it’ll serve as a pretty good warm-up to that one.

The Opa blog[^]:

We live in the as-a era. IaaS, SaaS, PaaS. Even Database-as-a-Service where companies offer SQL and NoSQL database management systems hosted online. We played with the concept a bit, and, in an era which is also the one of cloud storage with Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, Skydrive and the like, we wondered why applications and services shouldn't just use our cloud storage account to store our data. Why everything should be centralized? Why all applications and services behave like Mega and not like BitTorrent? That why we introduced in Opa 1.0.7 a new database back-end working on top of Dropbox.