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Smart Lock: Why sloth is a driver of the IoT progress

Reading time6 min
Views1.8K
When you are sitting in your comfy chair in your cool modern office, anything distracting you from your favorite routine is really annoying. Some may call it a sign of sloth, but in fact, it relates to optimization of workflows. Our computers and smartphones provide us with many opportunities to do a lot without leaving our place. Software as such cares about our control over the physical world by just clicking and tapping. Indeed, the digitization advances: what people have had to do with their muscles for centuries in the past, could be done with either a voice command or a text message today thanks to numerous remotely controlled gizmos. And the IoT plays a crucial role in all this for a reason.
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Real-time Chat Solutions vs Chat Platforms — Make Your Choice

Reading time4 min
Views3.9K
It’s More Than You Imagine…

The possibility of acquiring more profit through a chat app solution is gaining popularity than adopting to monthly plans based chat platforms


With the rise of instant conversation among the users, it's not surprising that the global mobile messaging app is estimated to reach around 2.1 billion active users by 2020. When the communication lies as the significant action in nature, then in fact the underlying tool “messaging application” also acquires the same importance. Thus, every chat platforms like WhatsApp demand a great market value according to the features and functionalities listed. Most of the business professionals and enterprises are urged to rely on subscription-based plans to avail such messaging platform.
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False Positives in PVS-Studio: How Deep the Rabbit Hole Goes

Reading time6 min
Views838
Единорог PVS-Studio и GetNamedSecurityInfo

Our team provides quick and effective customer support. User requests are handled solely by programmers since our clients are programmers themselves and they often ask tricky questions. Today I'm going to tell you about a recent request concerning one false positive that even forced me to carry out a small investigation to solve the problem.
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Blazor 0.8.0 experimental release now available

Reading time6 min
Views1.9K

Blazor 0.8.0 is now available! This release updates Blazor to use Razor Components in .NET Core 3.0 and adds some critical bug fixes.


Get Blazor 0.8.0


To get started with Blazor 0.8.0 install the following:


  1. .NET Core 3.0 Preview 2 SDK (3.0.100-preview-010184)
  2. Visual Studio 2019 (Preview 2 or later) with the ASP.NET and web development workload selected.
  3. The latest Blazor extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace.
  4. The Blazor templates on the command-line:


    dotnet new -i Microsoft.AspNetCore.Blazor.Templates::0.8.0-preview-19104-04

You can find getting started instructions, docs, and tutorials for Blazor at https://blazor.net.

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The story of how we changed the PVS-Studio icon

Reading time5 min
Views1.2K



The 7.0 release marked a new milestone in the history of the PVS-Studio analyzer — the analysis is now available not only for the code, written in C, C++, C#, but also in Java. In addition to this global improvement, some existing mechanisms for the analysis are refined and improved, diagnostic rules are added. There was another significant change that you could hardly missed. We changed the icon.

Note. In the article, you will not find cunning tricks or tips on designing icons. The purpose of the article is a bit different this time — it is to tell a story, and, if possible, make it interesting.
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Detecting Web Attacks with a Seq2Seq Autoencoder

Reading time7 min
Views5.6K
image

Attack detection has been a part of information security for decades. The first known intrusion detection system (IDS) implementations date back to the early 1980s.

Nowadays, an entire attack detection industry exists. There are a number of kinds of products—such as IDS, IPS, WAF, and firewall solutions—most of which offer rule-based attack detection. The idea of using some kind of statistical anomaly detection to identify attacks in production doesn’t seem as realistic as it used to. But is that assumption justified?
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The Overview of JavaScript Frameworks: Which One to Choose for Your Project?

Reading time4 min
Views1.8K
Ten years ago, companies who wanted to create cross-platform projects would have to cooperate with different development teams and experts. However, 2009 has changed the game, because the developers from Nitobi (later purchased by Apache) presented Cordova – a fresh framework that was able to convert web applications into mobile systems. Linking the devices’ APIs via plugins, developers could access smartphones and tablets. Cordova is a JavaScript-based tech compatible with various platforms.

In this guide, we will review three more JS-driven systems, look at their unique features and compare them.
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Designing Sound for Pathfinder: Kingmaker

Reading time16 min
Views3.3K


Pathfinder: Kingmaker (PF:K for short) is a role-playing video game created by Owlcat Games, released in Fall 2018 on Steam and GoG. Inspired by classic Bioware games, this project uses a popular board game system ruleset, combat takes place in Real-Time with Pause, follows an isometric camera, and has a non-linear story with multiple unique endings.


In this article, I will share a little about how we worked on designing the audio throughout the game’s development including task management, the search for inspiration, and troubleshooting. An experienced specialist may not find anything particularly groundbreaking in this recap, but beginners and enthusiasts will definitely discover some points of interest.

Implementing UI in iOS: Better, faster, and it scales

Reading time10 min
Views4.4K


A few months ago I came across a very interesting documentary series on Netflix called Abstract, they basically explore the output of professional designers from different sectors like architecture, graphic design, fashion, … in their workplaces.

It was easy to spot some similarities in the work of designers from other fields with that of an iOS developer who implements user interfaces. For example, when a designer is creating something that is big enough to be broken down into smaller parts, using a strategy like ‘Divide and Conquer’ is key to being able to focus on smaller parts that will be assembled at later stages in the process.

Breaking down a whole design into smaller subunits allows us to think about each problem in isolation, removing any dependencies between the components. But the full picture also needs to be present throughout the whole process, otherwise there can be problems when the time comes to fit everything back together.

On the other hand, while watching Abstract I noticed that in the design process for objects like a shoes, banners or buildings the final design remains fixed for the lifetime of the product. The design of a Nike shoe isn’t going to change after it is released and there aren’t going to be any updates once it’s on the shelf in the shop. Sometimes a design remains unchanged even 20 years later, and the product is still sound.
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I lost faith in the industry, burned out, but the cult of the tool saved me

Reading time6 min
Views35K


I often rail at technologies I find inadequate, and in response I receive (along with arguments) sheer anger and pain. Sometimes physical.

Developers take critique of their favorite technologies very personally for some reason. This “cult of the tool” is such a strange phenomenon I can’t explain it logically. Some say everyone’s prone to it, because a coder’s thinking processes intertwine very deeply with his programming language. Some say it’s a junior’s fallacy — you write something for the first time, it works, and you start treating your language like something divine.

Whatever it is, I never understood it.

I always considered cultists as imbeciles. But I always try to understand why imbeciles became them, why I’ve avoided that fate. I start thinking and bam! — it turned out I’m also an imbecile. I’m a cultist who worships F#. And, of course, there’s a story behind it.
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Independent Tests of Baikal-T1 — the first Russia's 28 nm SoC — and BFK 3.1 Evaluation Board

Reading time10 min
Views6.4K
Tech journalist Igor Oskolkov of 3DNews.ru has recently tested publicly available version of the evaluation board or, as the vendor calls it, the developer software-hardware complex, under the code name BFK 3.1 with the Russian SoC Baikal-T1 based on the MIPS P5600 Warrior architecture. Here goes the English translation of his text, that was first published in Russian by servernews.ru.
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The Processing of Unrecoverable Errors in Swift

Reading time6 min
Views3.8K

Preface


This article is an example of how we can do research into Swift Standard Library functions behavior building our knowledge not only on the Library documentation but also on its source code.


Unrecoverable Errors


All events which programmers call "errors" can be separated into two types.


  • Events caused by external factors such as a network connection failure.
  • Events caused by a programmer's mistake such as reaching a switch operator case which should be unreachable.
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Top 10 IoT sensors in 2019

Reading time8 min
Views5.1K
The very paradigm of automation where IoT solutions play a key role is based on a presumption that machines can act in both autonomous and intelligent manners. And what enables them doing so is a capability of handling tremendous flows of collected data.

The collectible data includes those various signals that both animate and inanimate object can send to the IoT systems. Hence, the objects should have some highly specific signal-generating devices to share information within the IoT.
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I ruin developers’ lives with my code reviews and I'm sorry

Reading time5 min
Views234K


Once upon a time there was a guy on my team so weak that he was going to be fired (a developer! Fired!). Every comment of mine was another nail in his coffin. I could almost hear the bang of the hammer every time I clicked “Submit review”. He was a nice person and I almost felt bad for him, but it didn’t stop me from tearing his work to shreds. I had an inalienable right to criticize his work, right? I’m a better developer, therefore I’m right. No one wants to say that bad code is good, right? He was eventually fired, not before leaving him without the customary bonus for a couple months.

I said to myself: “I’m not going to do his work, right? He was taking the place of a more talented developer. I did everything right”. But then I received another pull request for a review, and something changed. Drastically.
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The Game of Archetypes: How Storytelling Works for Tech Brands

Reading time2 min
Views1.3K
How’s your work week going? I took some time off publishing new articles and consulting clients to look at «The Hero and the Outlaw» by Carol Pearson and Margaret Mark. It’s a guide to leveraging the power of archetypes for your brand, and I think there’s much to learn from it.

Archetypes are properly defined as «universal constructs of the human psyche». In layman’s terms, these are images we all recognise because they’re built into our subconscious mind. One such example is the archetype of the hero  —  a good guy who triumphs over evil and saves the day.

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.NET Reference Types vs Value Types. Part 1

Reading time16 min
Views7.6K

First, let’s talk about Reference Types and Value Types. I think people don’t really understand the differences and benefits of both. They usually say reference types store content on the heap and value types store content on the stack, which is wrong.


Let’s discuss the real differences:


  • A value type: its value is an entire structure. The value of a reference type is a reference to an object. – A structure in memory: value types contain only the data you indicated. Reference types also contain two system fields. The first one stores 'SyncBlockIndex', the second one stores the information about a type, including the information about a Virtual Methods Table (VMT).
  • Reference types can have methods that are overridden when inherited. Value types cannot be inherited.
  • You should allocate space on the heap for an instance of a reference type. A value type can be allocated on the stack, or it becomes the part of a reference type. This sufficiently increases the performance of some algorithms.

However, there are common features:


  • Both subclasses can inherit the object type and become its representatives.

Let’s look closer at each feature.


This chapter was translated from Russian jointly by author and by professional translators. You can help us with translation from Russian or English into any other language, primarily into Chinese or German.

Also, if you want thank us, the best way you can do that is to give us a star on github or to fork repository github/sidristij/dotnetbook.

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Introduce Static Analysis in the Process, Don't Just Search for Bugs with It

Reading time15 min
Views5.3K
This article is an authorized translation of the original post. The translation was made with the kind help of the guys from PVS-Studio. Thank you, guys!

What encouraged me to write this article is considerable quantity of materials on static analysis, which recently has been increasingly coming up. Firstly, this is a blog of PVS-Studio, which actively promotes itself on Habr posting reviews of errors, found by their tool in open source projects. PVS-Studio has recently implemented Java support, and, of course, developers from IntelliJ IDEA, whose built-in analyzer is probably the most advanced for Java today, could not stay away.

When reading these reviews, I get a feeling that we are talking about a magic elixir: click the button, and here it is — the list of defects right in front of your eyes. It seems that as analyzers get more advanced, more and more bugs will be found, and products, scanned by these robots, will become better and better without any effort on our part.

Well, but there are no magic elixirs. I would like to talk about what is usually not spoken in posts like «here are things that our robot can find»: what analyzers are not able to do, what's their real part and place in the process of software delivery, and how to implement the analysis properly.


Ratchet (source: Wikipedia).
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Flightradar24 — how does it work?

Reading time4 min
Views123K
I’m going to hazard a guess and say that everyone whose friends or family have ever flown on a plane, have used Flightradar24 — a free and convenient service for tracking flights in real time.



But, if my friends are any indication, very few people know that the service is community-driven and is supported by a group of enthusiasts gathering and sending data. Even fewer people know that anyone can join the project — including you.

Let’s see how Flightradar and similar other services works.
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