Weekly Links – Static analysis, Hacking, Graphics, and Concurrency
My plan of posting links weekly hasn’t quite worked out recently – my wife gave birth to a little baby boy, Adam, a month ago, so I’ve been pretty busy. Since he’s sleeping now I figured I might be able to get a quick article in.
A Few Billion Lines of Code Later: Using Static Analysis to Find Bugs in the Real World
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2010/2/69354-a-few-billion-lines-of-code-later/fulltext
This article is kind of an advert for Coverity, but it’s interesting all the same. It’s partly about their static code-analysis tool, but mainly about the social aspects of selling the software.
A Big Case of …OOPS…
Is defense against SQL injection attacks important? Absolutely, but for a middle manager it’s probably an academic issue… until you see your site has been hacked, right in front of your eyes.
Hg Init: a Mercurial tutorial
Joel Spolsky might have stopped blogging, but he’s still writing other kinds of articles. This is an excellent introduction to Mercurial, a distributed version-tracking system. OK, so you might be stuck using Visual SourceSafe at work, but a coder can dream.
Processing.js
I’ve always fancied playing with Processing, the Java-based graphical environment, but the Java aspect always put me off. This is a JavaScript version, so anyone can view your creations.
Home-baked graphics
http://bit-player.org/2010/home-baked-graphics
In these days of pre-packaged charting libraries, it’s refreshing to see someone getting down to the metal (LISP and PostScript, in this case) to generate custom graphs. Why does the author bother? And where to go from there? Read for a discussion.
Prefer Futures to Baked-In “Async APIs”
http://www.drdobbs.com/go-parallel/article/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=222301165
Very useful, very specific, and practical article about a better technique for writing APIs that expose concurrency. Recommended reading despite Dr Dobb’s in-your-face adverts and pagination.
