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YAY!
I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.
Stephen Hawking
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As I sit here now, working from home at my newest job, I reflect, not with a sense of accomplishment, but with a sense of humility, knowing that there were many greater, smarter and harder working folks that traversed those same years making it all happen and enabling the opportunities that I've had. So for anyone who stumbles upon this lonely blog entry, wondering what this whole free software thing is; take a seat, pour a cup of tea, and relax for a few minutes. It's probably the last time you will have that brief illusion of a normal life, but you wont miss it one bit. Down the rabbit hole... of Linux kernel development.
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That's a pretty neat article
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Doug Hebenthal, who helped create the Xbox game console and the original Zune media player, has left the company after 21 years. We’re told he’s planning to join Amazon.com. It looks like Amazon is a Prime target for hot talent.
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In the past year, many CS professors and education pundits have written about how MOOCs are scaling up CS education to hundreds of thousands of students. I'm going to take a different approach here and tell the story of how I spent nine months teaching computer programming to one student. Between July 2011 and March 2012, I taught basic programming to Brian Goler.... Brian started out with no prior programming experience, but within a few months, he was able to build SwearBuy, a free web application where people can share reviews of products that they love. More importantly, Brian gained the ability to seek out and learn more advanced technical material on his own. My biggest contribution was guiding him over the hurdles that usually demoralize beginners.
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That's a cool story. It kind of makes me think of my own beginner experiences.
I definitely connect with his statement about a project driving the beginner to success. A particular project or hurdle has often driven me to grow my knowledge.
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I connected with that, too. I wrote a bit about my own experience here: Coding in Public[^]
Director of Content Development, The Code Project
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Interesting.
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Welcome to our continuing series of Code Project interviews. We talk to developers about their backgrounds, projects, interests and pet peeves.
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Google's new app scanner in Android 4.2 Jelly Bean moves the platform closer to Apple's model of vetting software before it is made available to mobile device users, a security expert says. Google isn't expected to copy Apple's model of controlling the distribution of all iPhone and iPad apps through a single app marketplace. However, the latest security feature acknowledges that most mobile device users want a trusted third party to determine whether an app has malicious code, or has hidden behaviors that are a privacy risk. Malware and aggressive adware have been a problem for Android. Will this help?
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There are two ways to wipe your PC. The first, "Refresh", is good if you simply need to clean things up, but want to keep your data, music, videos, and more. The second, "Remove everything" is useful when you want to start from scratch, such as when you sell the device, or hand it over to another member of the family. (My old laptops generally end up with the kids). Repaving your system: an age-old Windows tradition.
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One of the big problems with long-running development projects, especially big ones, are that knowledge around certain areas tend to pile up on certain people, creating "knowledge silos". Unfortunately, this process is also self-perpetuating, as people tend to draw to working with things they know, and avoid what they don't know. Starting a code review process won't even out this landscape completely, but it will give people enough of a boost to dare venture into the code by themselves, hopefully breaking any negative spiral that may have been created. It also helps bring new members of the team into the code base quickly. Does code review help you?
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Why do I think Rx matters? It’s a way to do asynchronous operations on event streams. Rather than hooking up click events and managing state with event handlers all over, you effectively “query” an infinite stream of events with LINQ. You can declaratively sequence events…no flags, no state machine. You can’t stop the open source train!
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So here is yet another plea for designers to stop “fixing” WebKit font smoothing by disabling subpixel rendering. Feel free to use it on light text on dark backgrounds, feel free to use it to fix custom font rendering on Windows or to style specific bits of text on the page to make it look more slender, but for main portions of text where readability is paramount please leave the default setting alone and let the operating system handle the smoothing. Antialiasing mode is not a “fix” for subpixel rendering — in most cases it’s a handicap.
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Using graphics to collect metrics is an old hack, going back to the "sprites" used on many early personal Web pages to track page views. Web request based tracking is also heavily used by both legitimate large-scale e-mailers and spam factories to collect information such as when and where e-mails are opened, and to test the "hit rate" for various subject lines and offer teases. But ContactMonkey gets even more personal about it, because it identifies each recipient explicitly, and reports back directly on them. It's a technique akin to those used by some "spear-phishing" attacks to inject code into e-mails—no, it doesn't execute code on the client. But it does create a way to collect information that might be useful for stalking someone. Used by stalkers, private investigators, ex-spouses... and the occasional PR consultant.
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They say no one can hear you scream in space, but if you so much as whisper on the Web, you can be tracked by a dozen different organizations and recorded for posterity. Simply visiting a website can allow its operators to figure out your general physical location, identify details about your device information, and install advertising cookies that can track your movements around the web. (Don't believe me? Check this out.) Activate the Cone of Silence.
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I saw mention of bugmenot in that article. Has anyone tried using it recently and found it useful? I tried it back a decade ago when newspapers started wanting logins to read their free online content; I almost never got a login from it that hadn't been disabled already (assuming the NYT, etc weren't intentionally flooding it with bogus ones to begin with).
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, waging all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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Last week I overheard two of the top Microsoft “watchers” discuss the Office group having bet against Windows 8, presumably because Office 2013 is not fully a (set of) Metro (aka, Windows Store) apps. Ok, as much as it pains me to defend Office I’m going to do so. I’m going to defend them because they are more right than wrong. Especially when you take a shareholder perspective. Not only will I defend what Office did for Windows 8, I’m going to defend some of their licensing decisions. Oh that should be fun. If Steve Ballmer wants to get fired all he has to do is mess up the Office profit stream.
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Microsoft's Office for iPad, iPhone, and Android is a reality. Although Office Mobile has been rumored and reportedly spotted in the wild, Microsoft has remained persistently quiet about its plans for the product. The Verge has learned through several sources close to Microsoft's plans that the company will release Office versions for Android and iOS in early 2013. It looks like you're trying to us a non-Microsoft OS. Would you like help?
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As our smartphones and computers continue to become obsolete and get discarded, the environmental problem of electronic waste gets worse. Needless to say, the greater the number of electronic components that can be reclaimed and reused, the better. That’s why scientists from the UK’s National Physical Laboratory (NPL) have developed a printed circuit board that falls apart when immersed in hot water. What happens when you spill coffee on it? Asking for a friend...
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Emergency crews and gear in place will help operators respond, but some portable phone-charging stations will go offline temporarily [ITworld]
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The recent launch of Windows 8 brings a lot of new opportunities for both designers and developers to build beautiful apps that are fun and easy to use. This site is a collection of explanations of the most important aspects of the new Windows 8 design language. Your instruction book for designing Windows 8 apps.
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Piercing a key defense found in cloud environments such as Amazon's EC2 service, scientists have devised a virtual machine that can extract private cryptographic keys stored on a separate virtual machine when it resides on the same piece of hardware.... The attack relied on "side-channel analysis," in which attackers crack a private key by studying the electromagnetic emanations, data caches, or other manifestations of the targeted cryptographic system. "But actually implementing such an attack has proven surprisingly difficult."
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IntelliCommand - an extension for Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 which helps to find the short keys. It shows the help windows with all possible combinations when you press Ctrl or Shift or Alt or their combinations (hold it for about 2 seconds to see this window). Also it shows the list of possible combination when you press first combination of chord shortcut keys, like Ctrl+K, Ctrl+C (this combination comments selected text in editor). Ctrl+Awesome!
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I think the Metro CSS files are a good mix of how to structure a Cascading Stylesheet as well as provide some insights as to what we can and should do to make our web applications easier to maintain and add a performance boost. Study good CSS practices and architecture by finding good resources, but also by studying real-world implementations.
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