The Insider News

Ovid [blogs.perl.org][^]:

What the hell is fifth normal form and why do we want it? Well, it deals with cases where we can avoid redundancy when information can be reconstructed from smaller bits of information and ... and ... and ... OK, so that's not helping. In fact, the vast majority of explanations on the Web aren't helping, so I'll explain how to fake database normalization. I'll even avoid big words. For those of you who know nothing about databases, this will help you tremendously. For those of you who know databases, try not to throw your coffee mug at the screen.

Random Acts of Senseless Blogging[^]:

So, this weekend I've started working on a simple, Arduino-based Inertial Navigation System. Using accelerometers and gyroscopes it is possible to calculate the traveled distance and the direction, from a known startpoint. The main problem of this method is that to get these distances, you have to perform integrations of the accelerations. Integration means that also every little error in measurement will be integrated, so they add up over time and the accuracy gets worse and worse. Therefore you need very good sensors and smart algorithms, being the reason why professional systems are expensive.

Hack a Day[^]:

When Intel and Apple released Thunderbolt, hallelujahs from the Apple choir were heard. Since very little in any of Apple’s hardware lineup is upgradeable, an external video card is the best of all possible world. Unfortunately, Intel doesn’t seem to be taking kindly to the idea of external GPUs. That hasn’t stopped a few creative people like Larry Gadea from figuring it out on their own. Right now he’s running a GTX 570 through the Thunderbolt port of his MacBook Air, and displaying everything on the internal LCD. A dream come true.

The Register[^]:

The huge popularity of the British-designed Raspberry Pi has caught Chipzilla's attention, and so you can now buy a similar bare-bones x86 PC named Minnowboard with a similar caseless design running an Angstrom Linux build... While Intel's foray into open source computing is to be welcomed, this hack doubts somehow that Minnowboard will have quite the appeal of its Raspberry rival. Although the board is powerful, it's certainly not cheap – but then, that's a perennial problem with Intel.

O'Reilly Radar[^]:

Lately there’s been a spate of articles about breakthroughs in battery technology. Better batteries are important, for any of a number of reasons: electric cars, smoothing out variations in the power grid, cell phones, and laptops that don’t need to be recharged daily. All of these nascent technologies are important, but some of them leave me cold, and in a way that seems important. It’s relatively easy to invent new technology, but a lot harder to bring it to market. I’m starting to understand why. The problem isn’t just commercializing a new technology — it’s everything that surrounds that new technology.

Ars Technica[^]:

Tomorrow at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas, the Pwnie Express will officially unleash Pwn Plug R2, the next generation in its arsenal of penetration testing and hacking hardware.... The new Pwn Plug looks less like a DC power supply plug—the form factor of its predecessor—and more like a small Wi-Fi access point or router. But inside, it's really a Linux-powered NSA-in-a-box, providing white hat hackers and corporate network security professionals a "drop box" system that can be remotely controlled over a covert Internet channel or a cellular data connection.

I, Cringely[^]:

There were two high points for me at Def Con 1. First was the appearance of Dan Farmer, then head of data security for Sun Microsystems. Dressed all in black leather with flaming shoulder-length red hair and a groupie on each arm, Dan sat literally making-out in the back row until it was time for his presentation. But that presentation was far more entertaining than the smooching. In a series of rapid-fire slides Farmer showed dozens of ways in which crackers had attacked Sun’s network.

Windows for your Business[^]:

Today, I’m excited to announce that Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview is now available for download for customers to start testing the operating system in their environments. Windows 8.1 Enterprise Preview builds on the Window 8.1 Preview which is currently available, adding premium features designed to address mobility, security, management and virtualization needs of today’s enterprise.

Square Engineering Blog[^]:

Interesting lessons can come from unexpected places! I was pleasantly surprised at how something as “simple” as reversing bits in a byte could lead me on an unexpectedly deep exploration: operation vs instruction count, memory access patterns and cache behavior, and low-level CPU instructions. It’s often very easy to make assumptions about the performance of code that we write, and I hope that this article serves as a reminder that the map is never the territory, and that the only way to understand what’s happening inside your code is by observing and measuring it.

Stephen Diehl[^]:

The second perpetual myth is that Haskell cannot be used for “real world applications”. Normally real world is usually left undefined in such a discussion, but can often be taken to mean that Haskell is not suited for database and web development work. Haskell has a rich library ecosystem and is well-suited for these tasks but I concede that there might be a systemic lack of introductory material for many domain specific tasks. Something that many projects and companies are trying to remedy.

Parallella[^]:

We at Erlang Solutions have had the pleasure of coming into contact with shiny Parallella board prototype and over the past few weeks we have been exploring how to utilise it as part of our experiments in the multicore domain. In this blog post Edward Tate, our resident OpenCL hacker, introduces the reasons we have been interested in making use of the Parallela: Data Parallelism and OpenCL.

Ars Technica[^]:

Ten months ago, the chipmaker Adapteva unveiled a bold quest—to create a Raspberry Pi-sized computer that can perform the same types of tasks typically reserved for supercomputers. And... they wanted to sell it for only $99. A successful Kickstarter project raised nearly $900,000 for the so-called "Parallella," and the company got to work with a goal of shipping the first devices by February 2013 and the rest by May 2013. As so often happens, the deadlines slipped, but Adapteva has done what it set out to do.

Ariya Hidayat[^]:

Attending technical events, from the local after-hours meetups to the high-caliber and well-known conferences, becomes the usual part of a developer’s life. Generally, those events are packed with 45-minute talks, often also to the full one hour. I argue that there are more benefits of limiting such tech talks to a shorter duration, say 20 minutes (or even 18 minutes, in the style of TED talks). The most important is that it will lead to a more thoughtful, lean, and balanced content.

AnandTech[^]:

The Nexus Q was killed off before other services could be added, but at a high level the Q’s functionality as a playback device rather than streaming endpoint carried onto its successor, the Chromecast. The Chromecast is obviously everything the Q should’ve been. It’s a simple, small, $35 HDMI dongle, powered by USB, that’s designed to discreetly plug into the back of a TV.... The hardware is what it needs to be – small, simple, and conducive to the low price point.

opensource.com[^]:

The GPLv2 continues to be the most widely used FOSS license, but has been rarely interpreted by courts. Most of these decisions have come from Germany as a result of the enforcement actions of Harold Welte. The recent Fantec decision in Germany is the latest such decision and provides guidance on the requirements for companies to manage their use of FOSS and the lack of ability to rely on statements from their suppliers.

OpenSignal[^]:

Fragmentation is both a strength and weakness of the Android ecosystem. When comparisons are made between Android and iOS the issue of different API levels, and the vastly different devices running them, is often emphasised. In this report we examine the extent of Android fragmentation and analyse its impact on both users and developers.

IEEE - The Institute[^]:

We take for granted how computers in the workplace are all connected together. Sharing files with coworkers, sending documents to a network printer, and accessing data from a networked server are all routine procedures thanks to the invention of Ethernet technology. On Ethernet’s 40th anniversary, the IEEE History Center shares excerpts from the oral history interview it conducted with Ethernet’s co-inventor Robert Metcalfe in February 2004.

Dream.In.Code[^]:

I recently found myself explaining to different pods of folks how to add 'scripting' to their games. The consistent response was confusion and bemoaning the difficulty of the task. Certainly there is some work to be done (if you want to add Lua, Javascript, Perl, Python etc) to your engine but it doesn't need to go _that_ far. With planned access points and a 'ninja' method to process what was entered you can have functional scripting with little hassle.

jack.minardi.org[^]:

I was having fun casting shadows with my laser pointer the other day. I began to wonder about the 3D information that was embedded in the 2D shadow. Given enough shadows of an object, could you recreate it? What information is lost, what is preserved?

Stephanie Rieger[^]:

Having spent some time with Firefox OS last week, I thought I would share some thoughts on the platform, and a few key aspects of the user experience.... I do have reservations regarding the occasionally overtly prescriptive definitions of a “mobile web app” (i.e. single page, JavaScript heavy, transition and gesture enabled), but am also interested in seeing how things play out. If FFOS does well, it may prove the first large scale investigation of just where the app/site threshold lies from a purely user-facing perspective.