“Work began on the Hurd, the true kernel of the GNU operating system, in May 1991, but it has yet to materialise as a production-ready kernel. Richard Hillesley tells the story…

“This comprehensive primer on the internal operations of WebKit and Gecko is the result of much research done by Israeli developer Tali Garsiel…Web browsers are probably the most widely used software. In this primer, I will explain how they work behind the scenes. We will see what happens when you type google.com in the address bar until you see the Google page on the browser screen.”

A multi-core CPU is not always a better performer than a single-core CPU. This fact depends upon many different factors, including the task at hand, the architecture of the CPU, etc. The following article provides a good bit of information on the factors surrounding this fact in detail. Check out the excerpt below or check out the full article here (scalibq.wordpress.com).

Lately I’ve been reading up on various tools, methods, frameworks, etc. related to 3D programming in Java. Why Java? No real reason except that it is quite portable and somewhat straight forward to get started with. I’ve never actually done any real 3D development so this is a first! Check my my awesome purple square that I drew via OpenGL:

“High-level languages are not intrinsically slow! David Chisnall explains how programming in a low-level language can make a compiler’s job harder, essentially wasting effort and slowing down your program’s processing.

Google Blockly is a new visual programming language that is itself written in JavaScript. This means that it can be embedded in any webpage and its code can even be exported to JavaScript, DART, or Python.

Now here is a really lengthy and interesting article from one of Microsoft’s engineers discussing the creating the Windows 8 user experience. In addition, the author describes a bit about the history of Windows UIs and the many reasons behind the many decisions made along the way.

There’s an excellent thread going on over at stackoverflow.com about suggestions for what every programmer should know about security.

If you’re using a Unix or Unix-like operating system you can leverage the GNU iconv library to validate the encoding of a file or files. Although, the GNU iconv library is actually meant to do file conversions, it can still be used in a way that will give you some understanding if the file(s) contain invalid byte sequences.

Here is a very simple client/server example coded in Perl. This is an extremely basic application - the goal was merely for me to learn how to use sockets in Perl. You can check out the code on github here: github.com/darkmuck/SimplePerlSockets.