How to Hunt Elephants MATHEMATICIANS hunt elephants by going to Africa, throwing out everything that is not an elephant, and catching one of whatever is left. EXPERIENCED MATHEMATICIANS will attempt to prove the existence of at least one unique elephant before proceeding to step 1 as a subordinate exercise. PROFESSORS OF MATHEMATICS will prove the existence of at least one unique elephant and then leave the detection and capture of an actual elephant as an exercise for their graduate students. COMPUTER SCIENTISTS hunt elephants by exercising Algorithm A: Go to Africa. Start at the Cape of Good hope. EXPERIENCED COMPUTER PROGRAMMERS modify Algorithm A by placing a known elephant in Cairo to ensure that the algorithm will terminate. ASSEMBLY LANGUAGE PROGRAMMERS prefer to execute Algorithm A on their hands and knees. DATABASE ADMINISTRATORS do not need to go out and capture elephants when they can retrieve them simply with an ad hoc query: STATISTICIANS hunt the first animal they see N times and call it an elephant.
Holding a Program in One's Head August 2007 A good programmer working intensively on his own code can hold it in his mind the way a mathematician holds a problem he's working on. Mathematicians don't answer questions by working them out on paper the way schoolchildren are taught to. They do more in their heads: they try to understand a problem space well enough that they can walk around it the way you can walk around the memory of the house you grew up in. That's particularly valuable at the start of a project, because initially the most important thing is to be able to change what you're doing. Your code is your understanding of the problem you're exploring. It's not easy to get a program into your head. Even the best programmers don't always have the whole program they're working on loaded into their heads. Avoid distractions. Even more striking are the number of officially sanctioned projects that manage to do all eight things wrong.
12 Hot Mobile Medical Apps -- InformationWeek Mobile medicine is everywhere. There's the iPhone app that lets you cut away images of muscle layers to see what lies beneath, an e-health record system for the iPad, and a smartphone-based blood pressure monitor. Here are a dozen innovative ones. 1 of 12 This free iPhone app shows you extensive views of the muscle systems. More Insights NIST Expands Database of Common Coding Errors to Detect Software Bugs - Security The National Institute of Standards and Technology expanded its database of software flaws to help developers avoid introducing bugs into their code right from the start. The Software Assurance Metrics and Tool Evaluation (SAMATE) Reference Dataset contains examples of software issues that could leave applications vulnerable to attackers. Version 4.0 of SAMATE, released Nov. 22, contains 175 broad categories of weaknesses with over 60,000 specific cases, more than doubling the number of categories that were included in the previous release. SAMATE was launched in 2004 to improve software assurance by making it easier to identify and exclude known issues.
Learn to Program With Code Academy Did you ever want to be a huge nerd your whole life, but didn’t know where to start? Don’t have the shelf space for the O’Reilly books, or found the various "in a nutshell" books too dry? I think Codecademy has an offer you can’t refuse. It’s an interactive site you start off simply with some naming conventions and math equations inside an interactive "terminal" window. The depth of the lessons look excellent, and the site is advertising a teacher beta once you log in, so if you want to contribute to the learning experience, you should absolutely get in touch with them. What about you? As an old coder, however, the interface and interaction this site provides looks pretty invaluable. Are you still here? [Update Oct 4, 2011: It's "Codecademy", not "Code Academy".
Search Engine Algorithm Research & Testing Performing tests on search engine algorithms can help you stay current on what the search engines are looking for and help guide your SEO strategies. The hardest part is devising tests that show an effect on individual ranking factors. Because change is a factor in itself, it’s nearly impossible to test a single ranking factor independently. Here are some suggestions and warnings on conducting a search engine algorithm test. Defining the Metrics Let’s start by looking at some metrics you could use: Ranking: Combines too many factors and should be communicated with its probable level of certainty. When you use ranking as a metric for a specific change between two timeframes, you won’t get a clear answer on the importance and performance of that change. Your competitors usually aren’t standing still – and could be doing things that you can’t monitor.The search engine could change the weighting of specific ranking factors. Metric Difference Between … ? Effected Broadness Threshold
Hacking the Xbox 10 Search Engines to Explore the Invisible Web Not everything on the web will show up in a list of search results on Google or Bing; there are lots of places that their web crawlers cannot access. To explore the invisible web, you need to use specialist search engines. Here are our top 12 services to perform a deep internet search. What Is the Invisible Web? Before we begin, let's establish what does the term "invisible web" refer to? Simply, it's a catch-all term for online content that will not appear in search results or web directories. There are no official data available, but most experts agree that the invisible web is several times larger than the visible web. The content on the invisible web can be roughly divided into the deep web and the dark web. The Deep Web The deep web made up of content that typically needs some form of accreditation to access. If you have the correct details, you can access the content through a regular web browser. The Dark Web The dark web is a sub-section of the deep web. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Operating Systems Tech Support: "May I ask what operating system you are running today?"Customer: "A computer." A girl walked into the computer center where I work. She said she was having problems with her Mac. Tech Support: "What operating system are you running? After conferring with her husband, it turned out she owned a Macintosh with System 8.1. Tech Support: "What version of Windows are you running?" A kid in my class joined a conversation I was having about older computers. Him: "I have the oldest Windows ever at my house. Tech Support: "What operating system do you run?" Tech Support: "Do you know what operating system you're on?" Customer: "I don't use DOS. One time I had to walk a Windows 95 user through a particular procedure. Me: "First you need to open DOS-prompt. My Friend: "I just installed Windows 98." My Friend: "What's your operating system?" Friend: "I heard about this thing called 'Linux'." Friend: "Does Windows 98 support Linux?" Customer: "Do you sell Mac OS X for Windows?" I went pale.
DropSend - Email large files and send large files Bleeding At the Keyboard---character study It's hard to think of actors William Shatner and Patrick Stewart as anything other than captains of the starship Enterprise. On the Enterprise we know exactly what they're likely to say and do. Even when they're not in Star Trek movies we keep expecting them to talk about engaging their warp drive, setting their phasers on stun, firing their photon torpedoes, and worrying about the Klingons or the Borg. As actors, they are thoroughly typecast in those roles. Similarly, all Java entities are typed. Type double variables can hold a decimal number in the range from about minus 10308 to plus 10308. Besides being able to hold a certain set of decimal values, double variables also have a set of operators to apply to those values: addition (+), subtraction (-), multiplication (*), and division (/). Type int variables can hold a whole number but only within the range from about minus two billion to about plus two billion. Type boolean variables can hold only one of two values: true or false.
How To Become A Hacker Copyright © 2001 Eric S. Raymond As editor of the Jargon File and author of a few other well-known documents of similar nature, I often get email requests from enthusiastic network newbies asking (in effect) "how can I learn to be a wizardly hacker?". Back in 1996 I noticed that there didn't seem to be any other FAQs or web documents that addressed this vital question, so I started this one. A lot of hackers now consider it definitive, and I suppose that means it is. Still, I don't claim to be the exclusive authority on this topic; if you don't like what you read here, write your own. If you are reading a snapshot of this document offline, the current version lives at Note: there is a list of Frequently Asked Questions at the end of this document. Numerous translations of this document are available: ArabicBelorussianBulgarianChinese, Czech. The five-dots-in-nine-squares diagram that decorates this document is called a glider. 1. 2. 3. 5. 2.