The Insider News

Dream.In.Code[^]:

Welcome to my JS game tutorial, or rather I should say, programming tutorial (well, it sounds better in the title and I do indeed explain it on a game (though the game itself doesn’t really matter)). Nevertheless, this tutorial is intended for those who want to get better in their Javascript coding (no matter how proficient they are yet) and therefore I will explain a lot of things around coding itself and focus a little less on the code lines.

Code Climate Blog[^]:

Just as Unix and Windows are composed of programs as units of functionality, our systems are composed of objects. When we build chunky, monolithic objects that wrap huge swaths of procedural code, we’re building our own closed universes of functionality. We’re trapping the features we’ve built within a given context of use. Our objects are obfuscating important domain concepts by hiding them as implementation details.

Informal Protocol[^]:

In the last few years, we’ve seen a pretty significant shift in how we use computers. We’ve gone from primarily using one Internet-enabled device (the PC) to using two (PC + phone) to using three (PC + phone + tablet), and who knows what else we’ll add in the next couple years. Not only are we looking up our data and documents on all these devices, we’re creating data and documents on them, and the time we’re spending to do it on the PC is getting smaller. Effortless and ubiquitous access to data is increasingly important to people. If your app deals with user’s data, building cloud sync into your app should not be a feature you bolt on to an app - it is the feature. It’s why you will beat competitors or lose hard to them.

Nikolai Tillmann's Blog[^]:

One month ago we released the Web App Preview of TouchDevelop, the mobile programming environment. Thanks to the feedback you’ve been sending us since then, we were able to greatly expand the list of supported platforms. As of today, the TouchDevelop Web App Preview at touchdevelop.com/app runs on PCs with Internet Explorer 10 or the latest versions of Chrome or Firefox, Microsoft Surface and other devices running Windows RT, iPad 2 or later (including the mini), iPhone 4 or later, various Android phones and tablets with Chrome, and Macs with the latest versions of Safari, Chrome or Firefox. For Windows Phone 7/8 you can get the fully featured app in the Windows Phone Store that can access even more sensors and data.

Ryan Tomayko[^]:

What we're learning at GitHub is that opting in to open source project constraints often results in better natural survivability characteristics for many types of business, product development, and operations activities. That is to say, processes designed to conform to open source constraints results in a project that runs well, attracts attention, and seems to be self perpetuating where the same project structured more traditionally requires much more manual coordination and authoritative prodding.

512 Pixels[^]:

A year before the Macintosh was released, Apple’s Lisa introduced the concept of a GUI and mouse to Apple’s customers. Often considered to be ahead of its time, the Lisa also offered protected memory, limited multitasking, hard disk support and more. Here are all the Apple mice from the Lisa to today's Magic Mouse and Trackpad.

Ars Technica[^]:

It's super-easy to open an account at a Web hosting company and start fiddling around there—two excellent Ars reader-recommended Web hosts are A Small Orange and Lithium Hosting—but where's the fun in that? If you want to set up something to learn how it works, the journey is just as important as the destination. Having a ready-made Web or application server cuts out half of the work and thus half of the journey. In this guide, we're going to walk you through everything you need to set up your own Web server, from operating system choice to specific configuration options.

TechHive[^]:

More and more of our data--our credit card numbers, tweets, photos, personal documents, browsing habits, music, and a hundred other things--is stored "in the cloud." The cloud metaphor evokes images of bits and bytes floating around in the ether somewhere, and we rarely hear tech companies talking about their data centers, where the data really lives.

Culture Digitally[^]:

As we have embraced computational tools as our primary media of expression, and have made not just mathematics but all information digital, we are subjecting human discourse and knowledge to these procedural logics that undergird all computation. And there are specific implications when we use algorithms to select what is most relevant from a corpus of data composed of traces of our activities, preferences, and expressions.... That we are now turning to algorithms to identify what we need to know is as momentous as having relied on credentialed experts, the scientific method, common sense, or the word of God.

TenFingerCrunch[^]:

While some people online stop at overall market share when comparing products, I am more concerned with their usage in the real world. I decided to look at sales numbers for Android and iOS devices in correlation with both their online market share and Black Friday sales numbers to see how they stacked up. What I found was rather interesting....

vogella blog[^]:

The Eclipse Common Build Infrastructure aligns the build setup of Eclipse projects and makes building an Eclipse-based project trivial for anyone. Here's how it works.

Ode to Code[^]:

"Why All The Lambdas?" is a question that comes up with ASP.NET MVC. Instead of lambdas, why don't we just pass a property value directly? Aren't we simply trying to give a text input the value of the property? There is more going on here than meets the eye, so let's start from the top...

Nettuts+[^]:

The Network panel gives us a view into the resources that are requested and downloaded over the network in real-time. Viewing network traffic isn’t the most glamorous activity – especially if you’re new to web development. However, performance becomes an important issue, as your site’s traffic increases. Identifying and fixing requests that take a long time to complete is an important step in optimizing a site.

ID Software[^]:

Attention modders: The DOOM 3 BFG Edition GPL Source code is now up on github. This source release does not contain any game data... but you're free to roll your own.

NCZOnline[^]:

Most discussions about sorting algorithms tend to end up discussing quicksort because of its speed. Formal computer science programs also tend to cover quicksort last because of its excellent average complexity of O(n log n) and relative performance improvement over other, less efficient sorting algorithms such as bubble sort and insertion sort for large data sets. Unlike other sorting algorithms, there are many different implementations of quicksort that lead to different performance characteristics and whether or not the sort is stable.

ZDNet[^]:

While some of us were enjoying our tofurkey over the past week-plus, others were combatting a thorny Windows Server time-rollback issue. Some Windows Server users are still recovering a recent problem caused by time servers at USNO.NAVY.MIL incorrectly provided time samples that listed 2000 as the current year.