Programmer Puzzles

Programmer Puzzle - Python Swallows A Global   Friday 02 August

Here's a teaser that poses a practical problem - one that crops up in everyday Python programming. See if you can work out the answer before looking at its solution and the pattern to follow to avoid it.  The question in this case is where did the global variable go?

News

Public Key Cryptography Set To Fail In Five Years   Wednesday 07 August

A presentation at this year's Black Hat security conference makes good arguments for the current foundation of our public key crypto system having a life of around five years. Its main message is that we have to develop more agile crypto systems.

OrientDB Graph Database Upgraded   Wednesday 07 August

OrientDB 1.5 has been released. This document graph database is open source, and the improvements to the new version include a new paginated local storage engine.

Android Fragmentation Visualized   Wednesday 07 August

How many distinct Android devices do you imagine there actually are? Open Signal has recorded nearly 12,000 and has produced a graphic to map the situation.

MongoDB Overtakes Access   Tuesday 06 August

MongoDB has come higher than Microsoft Access for the first time in the DB-Engines.com popularity rankings.

Intel Contest 2013 For Windows 8 Apps   Tuesday 06 August

Intel's App Innovation Contest 2013 (AIC 2013) has just launched in Russia, China, India and the US. Five hundred finalists will receive either a Lenovo All-In-One or a Tablet device and the top nine winners will share $100,000.

Verbal Expressions Are Easier Than Regular Ones   Monday 05 August

This is another of those great ideas that once you have seen you can't understand why it hasn't been invented before. Verbal expressions make use of a fluent interface to specify a match for any target string. 

Google Analytics Real Time API Announced   Monday 05 August

A new API from Google will give you a way to develop apps based on Google Analytics real-time data. This means you can show how many people are on the site and work out what they are reading - as it happens.

Windows 8 Share Overtakes Vista's   Monday 05 August

Latest monthly statistics shows that for the first time Windows 8 has more users than Windows Vista. But at the same time its month on month gain in July was the smallest since its launch.

Reaching The Unreachable - Pi Squared And Catalan's Constant   Sunday 04 August

You may have heard the reports of computing Pi to millions of digits, but you might not know that there are other related constants that are much more difficult to compute. Now we are getting closer to being able to compute these values as well - and it isn't a matter of more computing power. 

Anonymouth Hides Identity   Sunday 04 August

An open source project to combat "stylometry", the study of attributing authorship to documents based only on the linguistic style they exhibit, is proving that it is possible to change writing style so as to evade detection.

In Praise Of C++ Bjarne At ICPC   Sunday 04 August

The ICPC is a programming competition held every year for universities worldwide. This year the inventor of C++, Bjarne Stoustrup, was interviewed about the suitability of this language for competition purposes.  

Zen Photon Garden   Saturday 03 August

The curiously named Zen Photon Garden won the Mozilla Web Workers Dev Derby back in April. Now Mozilla has interviewed the programmer responsible, Micah Elizabeth Scott, and revealed some inner workings. 

Nao Walks Alone   Saturday 03 August

As well as telling jokes, dancing and generally mucking about, Nao is also into real research. A new video shows Nao with a depth camera on his head walking through rough terrain and all on his own. This is what a robot has to master if it is ever to get out more.

Yahoo Bets Its Future On Research   Friday 02 August

Last year Yahoo laid off many of its research team, to the benefit of both Microsoft and Google. Now Marissa Mayer is rebuilding Yahoo Labs with the idea that it can resume cutting edge research.

MSDN Site Revamped   Friday 02 August

Microsoft has changed the MSDN site to provide a better organized single point of entry for developers wanting to find material within Microsoft’s MSDN content.

NoFlo Kickstarter For Easy Programming   Friday 02 August

NoFlo is a flow-oriented language build using JavaScript that is causing a small media sensation. The report that it has raised half of its $100,000 target in just a few days has attracted a lot of attention. Is this the dawn of a new era in computing? Is this the future of programming?

Tensor Operations Are NP Hard   Thursday 01 August

Most non-mathematicians might think that tensor operations are pretty hard without any formal proof, but new results prove that they are NP Hard which is not good news if you are trying to work something out using them.

Persistent Data Storage API   Thursday 01 August

W3C’s web applications working group has published its recommendation for Web Storage. The spec defines an API for persistent data storage of key-value pair data in web clients.

Mozilla Web Literacy Standard   Thursday 01 August

Further to its white paper outlining a vision for a web literacy standard, Mozilla has now produced a first draft and is requesting comments.

The Core

The First Things I Look At On A SQL Server – Part 2   Monday 05 August

In the first part of this series I looked largely at server-level information, in this article I will concentrate mostly on the database-level information.

Babbage's Bag

The Mod function   Wednesday 07 August

What's modular arithmetic got to do with the real world? The answer any experienced programmer should give you is "a lot". It is not only the basis for many an algorithm it is part of the hardware.