Micropost

En 1972 se ponía en venta en las tiendas norteamericanas la Magnavox Odyssey, la primera videoconsola de la historia. Un año antes un estudiante de la Universidad de Stanford y su socio habían construido la primera máquina recreativa de la historia. A partir de estos dos acontecimientos clave los videojuegos comenzaron a popularizarse creando a día de hoy una gigantesca industria de ocio y entretenimiento capaz de competir en seguidores y volumen de ventas con el cine o la música. ...

The Python reference documentation explicitly documents this behavior in the section on for loops: The for-loop makes assignments to the variables(s) in the target list. […] Names in the target list are not deleted when the loop is finished, but if the sequence is empty, they will not have been assigned to at all by the loop. » Eli Bendersky | eli.thegreenplace.net

Quincy Larson was just a ”guy in a suit in an office” and decided he wanted to learn how to code. So he asked around. He started by picking up a bit of Ruby then found himself skimming through other languages like Scala, Clojure and Go. He learned Emacs then Vim and even the Dvorak keyboard layout. He picked up Linux, dabbled in Lisp and coded in Python while living on the command line for more than half a year. ...

What would ”nice looking”—or ”beautiful”, for that matter—actually mean when referring to source code? I asked some programmer friends what they thought that meant. Their answers were obvious, but still worth stating: Code should be locally coherent and single-functioned: One function should do exactly one thing. It should be clear about what it’s doing. Local code should explain, or at least hint at the overall system design. Code should be self-documenting. Comments should be avoided whenever possible. Comments duplicate work when both writing and reading code. If you need to comment something to make it understandable it should probably be rewritten. » Shawn McGrath | kotaku.com

Así, cabe preguntarse por qué el principal desarrollador de una pieza de software tan sensible y popular “va a la quiebra”. ¿Problemas de juego? ¿Derroche sin más? Porque un programador de ese calibre, en esa posición, debería cobrar lo suyo y más en Alemania, país de Koch. Pero la pregunta adecuada no es por qué va a la quiebra o cuánto cobra, sino de qué vive este hombre. ¿De qué vive -repetimos- el principal desarrollador de una pieza de software tan sensible y popular como GPG? La respuesta, desafortunadamente, es que nadie le pagaba por su trabajo: vivía de la caridad, de las donaciones. ¿Suena duro? Es aún peor. ...

The vulnerability in the GNU C Library (glibc) represents a major Internet threat, in some ways comparable to the Heartbleed and Shellshock bugs that came to light last year. The bug, which is being dubbed ”Ghost” by some researchers, has the common vulnerability and exposures designation of CVE-2015-0235. While a patch was issued two years ago, most Linux versions used in production systems remain unprotected at the moment. What’s more, patching systems requires core functions or the entire affected server to be rebooted, a requirement that may cause some systems to remain vulnerable for some time to come. The buffer overflow flaw resides in __nss_hostname_digits_dots(), a glibc function that’s invoked by the gethostbyname() and gethostbyname2() function calls. A remote attacker able to call either of these functions could exploit the flaw to execute arbitrary code with the permissions of the user running the application. ...

Except instead of the usual story, we’re going to try to answer this question in as much detail as possible. No skipping out on anything. This is a collaborative process, so dig in and try to help out! There’s tons of details missing, just waiting for you to add them! So send us a pull request, please! » Alex Gaynor | github.com

A French coder has developed what is thought to be the smallest-sized chess computer program. BootChess is only 487 bytes in size, and the code can be run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux computers. That makes it smaller than 1K ZX Chess - a Sinclair ZX81 computer game, which contained 672 bytes of code and had held the record for 33 years. » Leo Kelion | bbc.com

With the release of yet another time travel movie this week (Project Almanac), it’s time for us to look back at the great time travel movies of our past. Here are all the major time travel movies ever, ranked. Here are the rules: No animation. No short films. And no movies that where someone is frozen (or something) and then they wake up in the future (so Mel Gibson’s Forever Young, Encino Man are OUT). ...

All secure crypto on the Internet assumes that the DNS lookup from names to IP addresses are insecure. Securing those DNS lookups therefore enables no meaningful security. DNSSEC does make some attacks against insecure sites harder. But it doesn’t make those attacks infeasible, so sites still need to adopt secure transports like TLS. With TLS properly configured, DNSSEC adds nothing. » Thomas & Erin Ptacek | sockpuppet.org