The Insider News

Eli Bendersky's website[^]:

A few weeks ago I wrote about the comparison between regex-based lexers in Python and Javascript. Javascript running on Node.js (V8) ended up being much faster than Python, and in both languages a speed improvement could be gained by switching to a single regex and letting the regex engine do the hard work. However, in the real world you’ll find that most lexers (particularly lexers for real programming languages) are not written that way.

Software Sustainability Institute[^]:

The current state of experimental reproducibility in computer science is lamentable. The result is inevitable: experimental results enter the literature which are just wrong. I don’t mean that the results don’t generalise. I mean that an algorithm which was claimed to do something just does not do that thing.

Dan Grover[^]:

I was feeling miffed a few months ago because a product I was managing at a startup got cancelled just as it was ready to ship. The company made a big strategy change and ten months' hard work from my team went down the drain.... Whenever something like this happens, it gets me thinking about how quickly most of the things I’ve worked on have become obsolete. Everything from one-off tools I worked on as an intern in college, to more successful pursuits like apps or businesses that I've sold. It's all gone down the drain eventually.

Unchartered Waters[^]:

The document is not something someone leaked, a half-baked message sent off in a moment when a quick decision was needed. Nor is it an insiders document, full of shorthand terms and abbreviations that make complete sense, but only to insiders. No, this was actually designed for everyone to read, for all employees to read. It is on the web now, hosted on a Microsoft Website; you can read the full memo yourself. I’ve got a lot to say here, but I’m going to start by answering Joel’s question (‘what the heck does all this mean?’) with a little bit of commentary, leaving conclusions for next time.

The H Security[^]:

According to a report by security expert Kyle Lovett on the Bugtraq mailing list, critical security vulnerabilities exist in numerous ASUS routers and can be remotely exploited to take complete control of the router. The weak point is the AiCloud media server. If AiCloud is activated, unauthorised users can access critical system files over the internet – including files containing access credentials for the router in plain text format.

Polygon[^]:

In two years, mobile and tablet games will be predominantly hardcore. I understand why you might be skeptical: You, a hardcore gamer who just so happens to own a mobile device, have been hurt before.... But hear me now: The future is all but guaranteed. Why so confident? Simple. Every media platform optimized for games eventually ends up going hardcore. Mobile will not be different.

TechRadar[^]:

Ten years ago, the Linux world was very different from today. Back then, the idea of using Linux if you weren't a hard-core computer geek was laughable. Mark Shuttleworth changed all that. He came along with an idea that Linux could be easy to use, and he made it so.... Canonical's contribution to the Linux ecosystem wasn't new code, but a new mindset. A mindset that said "Hey, Linux is for everyone." And, interestingly, that mindset was what Linux needed then. There were already hundreds of developers working on the kernel, but very few working on making it friendly.

ReadWrite[^]:

As vendors, coders and users inch toward the smart-devices-everywhere future colloquially known as the Internet of Things, they're starting to address a whole bunch of nitty-gritty issues. For starters, there's the question of just how the various devices connected to the Internet of Things will talk to each other. Beyond that, though, lies an even larger challenge. Which is, once we've got devices on the Internet of Things speaking a common language, what in the world are they actually going to say to one another?

Stone Design[^]:

Today I’m going to talk about the intersection between software and psychedelics, most specifically about the long strange trip from the NeXT computer to iOS.... And, here's the non-obvious take home of living on the cusp of the Now: We are always, always at the brink of being on the ground floor for the next big thing. You'll have a deep feeling, just as I did in '89. Go with it!

Manu Cohen-Yashar's Blog[^]:

A customer asked me the other day how to choose the right No SQL Database? Unfortunately this is not an easy task. There are over 150 different offerings and there are significant differences between them. The best advice I can give is “Choose the database that matches best your problem”.

All Your Base Are Belong To Us[^]:

Here’s a quick brainteaser for you. Suppose you really want to find all the prime numbers in a certain range, and store them in a List<uint>. And also suppose that you want to parallelize that calculation to make it as quick as possible. You then need to synchronize access to the list so that it’s not corrupted by add operations performed in multiple threads. Would it be better to use a C# lock (CLR Monitor) or a Windows mutex to protect the list of primes?

Sucuri Blog[^]:

One of the first server-level compromises I had to deal with in my life was around 12 ago, and it was caused by a SSH brute force attack. A co-worker set up a test server and chose a very weak root password for it. A few days later, the box was owned running IRC bots and trying to compromise the rest of the network. That was just the first of many server-level compromises caused by SSH brute force attacks that I would end up responding to, and even after more than 10 years, quite a few of the server remediations that we do here at Sucuri are actually caused by the same thing.

Greg Reda[^]:

Imagine you have a 4.2GB CSV file. It has over 12 million records and 50 columns. All you need from this file is the sum of all values in one particular column. How would you do it? Writing a script in python/ruby/perl/whatever would probably take a few minutes and then even more time for the script to actually complete. A database and SQL would be fairly quick, but then you'd have load the data, which is kind of a pain. Thankfully, the Unix utilities exist and they're awesome.

Smashing Magazine[^]:

There was a time when map assignments arrived from clients in a FedEx envelope, full of research, including Xerox’ed maps taped together and marked up with a highlighter. Back then, I could search online for photo references, but it certainly wasn’t the 3-D experience of flight that it is now. With Google Earth, I can get the lay of the land and see the heights of buildings and the way green spaces meet city blocks. These details give me a sense of place that fires my imagination.

TechHive[^]:

Graph Search seems like a great idea in theory. Facebook has collected billions, maybe trillions of pieces of data about its users over the last nine years, and making that data searchable is a natural move.... This feature can be useful: I searched for photos of my friends who visited Hawaii, because I just returned from a trip to Oahu and wanted to see their photos of the islands. But it also gives you the ability to search for incriminating photos of your ex, or for others to find terrible photos of you. Dislike.

GeekWire[^]:

Bill Gates opened his talk at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit today by saying we’ve entered a “golden age of computing,” as connectivity, data and processing power open up new opportunities to solve some of the world’s biggest problems. Which paves the way, of course, for the return of Microsoft Bob. OK, not really, but in response to one question, the Microsoft chairman did refer to the company’s ill-fated virtual Windows assistant, circa 1995, as an early example of a ”personal agent” helping lead us through our daily tasks.

Ars Technica[^]:

The system that began this cycle, resuscitating the American video game industry and setting up the third-party game publisher system as we know it, was the original Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), launched in Japan on July 15, 1983 as the Family Computer (or Famicom). Today, in celebration of the original Famicom's 30th birthday, we'll be taking a look back at what the console accomplished, how it worked, and how people are (through means both legal and illegal) keeping its games alive today.

Sealed Abstract[^]:

You may be concerned that the NSA is reading your e-mail. Is there really anything you can do about it though? After all, you don’t really want to move off of GMail / Google Apps. And no place you would host is any better. Except, you know, hosting it yourself. The way that e-mail was originally designed to work. We’ve all just forgotten because, you know, webapps-n-stuff. It’s a lot of work, mkay, and I’m a lazy software developer. Today we kill your excuses. Because I’m going to show you exactly how to do it, it’s going to take about two hours to set up...