11 August 2020

59 links · Tuesday

Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC2 now available | Azure DevOps Blog

Today, we released Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC2. This is our last planned prerelease before our final release of Azure DevOps Server 2020. You can upgrade from Azure DevOps Server 2020 RC2 or previous versions of TFS and Azure DevOps. You can find the full det…

.NET Core August 2020 Updates – 2.1.21 and 3.1.7 | .NET Blog

Today, we are releasing the .NET Core August 2020 Update. These updates contain security and reliability fixes. See the individual release notes for details on updated packages. Security CVE-2020-1597: ASP.NET Core Denial of Service Vulnerability Microsoft is…

Steve Blank Teaching Lean Innovation in the Pandemic

Remote education in the pandemic has been hard for everyone. Hard for students having to deal with a variety of remote instructional methods. Hard for parents with K through 12 students at home try…

Creating a QR Code step by step

This JavaScript demo application visualizes in detailed steps, how a text string is encoded into a QR Code barcode symbol. The content of this page essentially explains and justifies how my QR Code generator library works internally.

The Five P Framework for Product Discovery

Deciding what to build is both the most important and often the most nebulous part of a product manager's job. So how do great product managers do this? I've outlined a simple yet effective framework that I use, called the "Five P's."

I don’t trust Signal

Occasionally when Signal is in the press and getting a lot of favorable discussion, I feel the need to step into various forums, IRC channels, and so on, and explain why I don’t trust Signal. Let’s do a blog post instead.

Would breaking up 'big tech' work? What would? — Benedict Evans

Most of the things we worry about aren't actually competition problems, but even where they are, breakups are unlikely to be effective. The real answers are in much more detailed and micro work: in regulating the internal mechanics of these products, line by l…

Careers in Industry and Academia

Two Value Systems I recently spoke at Recursion Pharmaceuticals’ Career Insights Series on career development and trajectory in industry (and how it differs from the same in academia, for...

What Is a Cholesky Factorization?

The Cholesky factorization of a symmetric positive definite matrix $LATEX A$ is the factorization $LATEX A = R^T!R$, where $LATEX R$ is upper triangular with positive diagonal elements. It is a ge…

joseftw/jos.httpclient

Contribute to joseftw/jos.httpclient development by creating an account on GitHub.

SpaceX & Starlink: Is Satellite Internet a Good Idea?

SpaceX plans to launch 12,000 satellites to provide world-wide internet coverage with Starlink. Is that a good idea? How fast can satellite be? Is it safe to have that satellites many in orbit? And, why has nobody attempted this before? Well, let's find out!…

Building a BASIC Interpreter, '80s Style, Part 2

If you recall from part one of the series, we only really delved into Retroputer BASIC’s first phase of parsing — namely, converting the entered line into uppercase and checking if quotes were prop...

Building a BASIC Interpreter, '80s style

It’s funny the rabbit holes one ends up. One of my personal projects for several years has been the creation (exploration, really) of a “fake emulator” — that is, an emulator for a computer that ne...

Let’s implement a Bloom Filter

I am planning to create a series of blog posts that includes some literature research, implementation of various data structures and our journey of creating a distributed datastore in distrentic.io.

It is perfectly OK to only code at work, you can have a life too.

There is often pressure inside Software development for Software developers to code outside of work hours. Whether you are a Python, Ruby, Java, or any other developer... There is absolutely no need to code outside of work if you don't want too. Coding is cons…

Free SSL Certificates and SSL Tools

Free SSL certificates issued instantly online, supporting ACME clients, SSL monitoring, quick validation and automated SSL renewal via Certbot or REST API.

The kernel and BitKeeper part ways

Back in early 1999, your editor got a call from Larry McVoy. He was worried that Linus Torvalds was on the verge of burning out as the kernel project grew. The problems in those days were quite evident; Linus, it was being said, did not scale. But, accordin…

The day I accidentally built a nudity/porn platform

I didn’t know that my next project will turn into a nudity platform and a home for spammers. But it did happen while I wasn’t paying attention. And here are the details. For the next 5/…

Changing World, Changing Mozilla – The Mozilla Blog

This is a time of change for the internet and for Mozilla. From combatting a lethal virus and battling systemic racism to protecting individual privacy — one thing is clear: ...

I Built My First Google Chrome Extension!

As a developer, it's nice to be able to create things to make your life easier. I was tired of having to open up my videos just to copy the link and share it. So, I created my first Chrome Extension! It shows me a list of my most recent videos and allows me to…

PDF: Still Unfit for Human Consumption, 20 Years Later

Research spanning 20 years proves PDFs are problematic for online reading. Yet they’re still prevalent and users continue to get lost in them. They’re unpleasant to read and navigate and remain unfit for digital-content display.

That UPS you bought for your home server may not be as useful as you think

Some years ago I decided to install a server at home for use as a NAS (network-attached storage) in my home network, and for an Internet-facing server. I live in a place where blackouts are very in…

Use Visual Studio in Presentation Mode | Visual Studio Blog

Have you ever seen a presentation using Visual Studio, but had a hard time seeing the too-small fonts in the editor, Solution Explorer and menu system? How about all the custom extensions and themes the presenter used, making it harder to figure out what exact…

Reactive Extensions for .NET | endjin

The Reactive Extensions for .NET ("Rx" for short) are a set of libraries for working with asynchronous and event-based information sources. While Rx has become widely adopted in client-side code, its roots are in highly scalable server-side processin…

Tip 273 - Getting started with Azure Image Builder

Having standard Virtual Machine (VM) images can help you to make sure that your VMs are all configured the same and have the same properties and security policies applied to them. You can create VM images with the Azure Image Builder. This allows you to define…

GraphQL on Azure: Part 3 - Serverless With JavaScript

Last time we look at how to get started with GraphQL on dotnet and we looked at the Azure App Service platform to host our GraphQL server. Today we’re going to have a look at a different approach, using Azure Functions to create run GraphQL in a Serverless mod…

The Clean Network - United States Department of State

Clean Networks is a comprehensive effort by a coalition of like-minded countries and companies to secure their critical telecommunications, Internet, cloud computing, data analytics, and 5G technologies from malign actors by relying on only trusted vendors who…