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Around the Web - 2nd-6th of February

Here are some interesting links and things I've seen and read over the last week (more or less). I'll make an effort to keep posting something like this every so often assuming nothing else takes its place.

  • Crunchbang Linux closes its' doors. Luckily there's still Archbang. Thanks for the awesome distro @corenominal, best of luck to you in your future endeavours!
  • GnuPG was running out of money, but the community rallied behind the project, with individual contributions raising over €120,000, not including large donations from the Linux Foundation, payments processor Stripe and Facebook.
  • The courts ruled that British intelligence agency GHCQ's "full take" (i.e. metadata and all traffic) collection of all data transiting the UK was unlawful for seven years.
  • The Electronic Frontier Foundation has won its four-year Freedom of Information Act lawsuit over secret legal interpretations of a controversial section of the Patriot Act, including legal analysis of law enforcement and intelligence agency access to census records.
  • The U.S. Department of Justice apparently thinks 80% of traffic on the Tor network is child pornography. I don't even know what to think.
  • Radim Řehůřek takes us on a guided introduction to data science in Python.
  • Warren Henning encourages us to go on an adventure and learn mathematics.
  • Commits.io - your code is beautiful, but most people will never see it... why not turn it into a poster?
  • In "Talking to Pluto is hard", Emily Lakdawalla explains in detail some of the challenges in getting data back from space.
  • The C2 Programming Wiki had something of a redesign, which you can see here. Original seems to still be available. Archive here.
  • A concise example of how same-page postbacks work(ed?) in ASP.NET. Some of us are still working with ASP.NET 2!
  • I came across some databinding expressions I didn't recognise, so here's a list. I'd like to know the use case for being able to databind at all those different points in the pages' lifecycle. That said, with the next version it'll probably all change yet again. Open-source ASP.NET with Linux and OSX support is a killer feature though.
  • Scott Hanselman's second list of .NET Interview Questions. Great for a refresher, I'm happy to say I could take a reasonable stab at about 60% of this list at the moment.
  • Another Hanselman post, this time on static analysis with NDepend.
  • The notes from the first design meeting for C# 7 have been made available on Github!
  • Does your code pass The Turkey Test? It's pretty much a gold standard test-case for software internationalisation. Don't forget that working with dates and times is fraught with danger, too.
  • A software bug a decade in the making - the mysterious case of the disappearing Polish Ś.
  • NVIDIA G-SYNC code in an alpha display driver for an AdaptiveSync-capable display reveals some interesting goings-on.
  • Oracle v. Google could go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court after Google petitioned it to overturn a previous appeals court ruling favoring Oracle Corporation.
  • Facebook just taught us all how to build websites (again.)
  • The open-plan office and the extrovert ideal. Matt writes some very interesting posts!
  • Does your team respect the build? They will.
  • NimbleText is a great little editor with some nicely integrated expression evaluation. It's exceptionally good at certain tasks, like writing schema modification scripts for databases.

N.B: The views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle Corporation. I will not be commenting on Oracle v. Google myself, in accordance with Oracle's Social Media Participation Policy.