7 steps to securing Java

Java, the popular OS-independent platform and programming language, runs on just about every kind of electronic device imaginable, including computers, cell phones, printers, TVs, DVDs, home security systems, automated teller machines, navigation syste…

Java, the popular OS-independent platform and programming language, runs on just about every kind of electronic device imaginable, including computers, cell phones, printers, TVs, DVDs, home security systems, automated teller machines, navigation systems, games and medical devices.

Lanczos algorithm

Lanczos algorithm

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Lanczos algorithm is an iterative algorithm invented by Cornelius Lanczos that is an adaptation of power methods to findeigenvalues and eigenvectors of a square matrix or the singular value decomposition of a rectangular matrix. It is particularly useful for finding decompositions of very large sparse matrices. In Latent Semantic Indexing, for instance, matrices relating millions of documents to hundreds of thousands of terms must be reduced to singular-value form.
Peter Montgomery published in 1995 an algorithm, based on the Lanczos algorithm, for finding elements of the nullspace of a large sparse matrix over GF(2); since the set of people interested in large sparse matrices over finite fields and the set of people interested in large eigenvalue problems scarcely overlap, this is often also called the block Lanczos algorithm without causing unreasonable confusion. See Block Lanczos algorithm for nullspace of a matrix over a finite field.

In Search of Lost Time

information technology

‘For a long time I would to go to bed early. Sometimes, the candle barely out, my eyes closed so quickly that I did not have the time to tell myself: I’m falling asleep.’  

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Taking the code literally

The performers are reading the machine-code version of Marcel Proust’s novel. During the eight hours of a working day the humans are playing computer. For these purposes the text is first deconstructed into its individual parts — the letter and characters — which in turn are decoded into the Ascii-code — a code underlying digital text processing. Each letter is represented by an individual sequence of signs, consisting of zeros and ones. The performance is situated in an ironic lab situation and attempts to find beauty inside of the microstructures of the digital. During the act of reading, interpreting and presenting the work of art emerges, posing questions about the nature of the digital and the analogue, of work and art, time and beauty.

From the analog to the digital and back again

The sequence of events of the performance is described in this manual.
Starting from the ASCII-Version of Marcel Proust’s novel ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ it is then re-coded into zeros and ones and then read by two performers alternately (one is reading the zeros, the other one the ones). The third person is CPU (the Central Processing Unit): She interprets the zeros and ones with the aid of an ASCII allocation table, cuts out the corresponding letter from the prepared sheets and turns it over to Display, who sticks it onto the wall panel.

After eight hours of performance about 250 characters can be processed.

Concept: Karl Heinz Jeron and Valie Djordjevic

A five minute extract from the performance “A la recherche du temps perdu” on 20 March 2006 in SPACE, London, during the xxxx festival 2006 (http://1010.co.uk/xxxxx_arch.html). Performance by Karl Heinz Jeron and Valie Djordjevic. More info on http://khjeron.de/alarecherche

We are using the electronic versions of the first three parts of ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ from Project Gutenberg.

The performance is licenced under the GNU General Public License.

Credits:

First performance on 19 November 2005 at the allgirls gallery in Berlin.

Participants:

True: Valie Djordjevic
False: Karl Heinz Jeron
CPU: Heissam el-Wardany
Display: Dani Djordjevic

Second performance on 20 March 2006 in SPACE, London , as a part of the xxxxx event series.

Participants:

True: Valie Djordjevic
False: Yair Wallach
CPU: Karl Heinz Jeron
Display: Elvina Flower

Third performance on 10 September 2006 in Blumberg, Vienna, during the paraflows festival.

Participants:

True: Verena Brückner
False: Florian Kmet
CPU: Thomas Hörl
Display: Peter Kozek

Exploding Apple products are rare

Credit: Regional Express
Apple’s iPhones are always among the hottest gadgets of any holiday shopping season, but for one passenger on an Australian flight, the phone was too hot to handle — literally.

While on Australian flight Regional Express ZL319 Friday, a passenger’s iPhone 4 (not the iPhone 4S, which is Apple’s latest model) suddenly started “emitting a significant amount of dense smoke, accompanied by a red glow,” according to a Regional Express statement.

The plane, which was flying from Lismore to Sydney, was in the midst of landing when the incident occured. “In accordance with company standard safety procedures, the flight attendant carried out recovery actions immediately, and the red glow was extinguished successfully,” according to Regional Express’ statement.

After landing, the iPhone was handed over to officials at the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. There’s no official word yet on what caused the phone to combust.

Exploding Apple products are rare, but explosions have happened in the past, mostly related to the devices’ lithium ion batteries overheating.

The European Union launched an investigation in 2009 after multiple instances of iPhones and iPod Touches exploding or catching fire midflight were reported in the U.K., Holland, France and Sweden.
Apple also recalled its first-generation of iPod nanos sold between September 2005 and December 2006 because the battery would overheat and “pose a safety risk,” according to the company’s website.

good programmers

Joel on Software

Hitting the High Notes

by Joel Spolsky
Monday, July 25, 2005

In March, 2000, I launched this site with the shaky claim that most people are wrong in thinking you need an idea to make a successful software company:

The common belief is that when you’re building a software company, the goal is to find a neat idea that solves some problem which hasn’t been solved before, implement it, and make a fortune. We’ll call this the build-a-better-mousetrap belief. But the real goal for software companies should be converting capital into software that works.

For the last five years I’ve been testing that theory in the real world. The formula for the company I started with Michael Pryor in September, 2000 can be summarized in four steps:

Best Working Conditions Best Programmers Best Software Profit!

It’s a pretty convenient formula, especially since our real goal in starting Fog Creek was to create a software company where we would want to work. I made the claim, in those days, that good working conditions (or, awkwardly, “building the company where the best software developers in the world would want to work”) would lead to profits as naturally as chocolate leads to chubbiness or cartoon sex in video games leads to gangland-style shooting sprees.

How do I change the name of a label in blogger?

How do I change the name of a label?

Let’s say you have a number of posts with the label Label-1 but you’ve decided that you’d rather call it Label-2 instead. You can’t edit the name of a label directly, but there’s a simple workaround to accomplish your goal:

Go to the Posting | Edit Posts tab for your blog.
Click Label-1 in the label list.
Click Select All to select every post with this label.
From the Label Actions… menu, choose Apply label > New Label…
Enter Label-2 as your new label. (If you already have some posts with this label, you can simply add that label, without creating a new one.)
Now all the selected posts should have both labels. From the Label Actions… menu again, select Remove label > Label-1, and you’ve completed the switch.

Note: If you have a large number of posts with this label, they may not all appear on one page. You can show more posts at once using the Posts Per Page menu. If you still can’t show them all at once, then simply repeat the steps above until you’ve changed the labels on all the posts you wanted to affect

programming class

Questions Addressed:

How Programming Languages Evolved
How the computer stores data
Numbering systems the computer likes
Different data types
Different programming Syles
Procedural
Functional
Object Oriented
What does it mean when a language is “strongly” or “weakly” typed
What is compiling and do I need to do it?
When I would do it, and when I would not
Why, what advantage does it provide
Modern Computer Languages Overview
Bash
Perl
Python
Ruby
C
C++
Java
Vala
C#/Mono
Programming methodologies
Waterfall
RAD
Summary of Graphical Programming Libraries
GTK
QT
FLTK
SDL
And finally, Programmers tools:
Eclipse
NetBeans
Anjuta

This is a lot of topics, and this week will be an overview. It should get you enough information to recognize the labels on the map, even if you are not 100% sure where the map will lead you. That will be the task for the following weeks.