The Trawler: № 6

Welcome one and all to another issue of The Trawler, the Internet’s premier collection of “stuff”.

---

Imaging

We’ll begin our excursion with a couple of image processing articles. In the first, we look at automatic colouring of black-and-white images (or films) using the dark magic of Convolutional Neural Networks. Meanwhile, Justin McDowell walks us through the heterogeneous collection of blending modes the W3C has recommended.

The Fruit Company

I’m sure my fellow Mac-aficionados would have been as distressed as I was to read that OS X was the “most vulnerable software of 2015”. To add insult to injury, iOS came in at second place. Oh, the humility. But hang on, we all know that statistics are open to interpretation. Thomas Reed takes a closer look at the method behind CVE Details’ dubious metrics and expresses the results with a somewhat different bias.

High Performance Computing

Adam Drake describes the process by which he proved command-line tools can be 235× faster than your Hadoop cluster. In similar vein, Ted Dziuba wrote the amusingly titled “Taco Bell Programming.”

Programming

Matt Stancliff teaches us “How to C in 2016.” Personally I think he misses the single most important thing: the programmer’s excuse.¹

Internet

Randy Milgrom gives us a fascinating history lesson in “How the Net Was Won” while Hossein Derakhshan warns us that “Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are Killing the Web.”

Web-design

I’ve linked to it before but, in case you missed it, take some time to consider Maciej Cegłowski’s “The Website Obesity Crisis” talk. There’s value here for everyone with even a passing interest in web-design and production.

You should also read Troy Hunt’s compelling article, “It’s 2016 already, how are websites still screwing up these user experiences?”

Ana Tudor explores the powers of CSS calc(). I’ve started using calc() in my own work and I can tell you that it takes away much of the pain of writing flexible, fluid CSS.

Heydon Pickering discusses “Flexbox Grid Finesse.” Flexbox is, without a doubt, the CSS layout model de rigueur. I built the Perpetual βeta atop a Flexbox model.

Privacy

“Why privacy is important, and having ‘nothing to hide’ is irrelevant” is a think piece by Robin Doherty and a Perpetual βeta recommended read.

See also: Web Privacy Census.

Miscellanea

All roads do indeed lead to Rome.

Is 2016 going to be the year we finally start to realise the dream of virtual reality?