Young Programmer

Gerrit Blank was on his way to school when he saw a massive fireball heading straight towards him from the sky. The white-hot meteorite bounced off the schoolboy's hand and hit the ground so hard it left a foot-long crater in the tarmac - as well as a three-inch scar on his hand. Gerrit, 14, said: "At first I just saw a large ball of light and then I suddenly felt a pain in my hand. "Then, a split second after that, there was an enormous bang like a crash of thunder." "The noise that came after the flash of light was so loud that my ears were ringing for hours afterwards. "When it hit me it knocked me flying and then was still going fast enough to bury itself in the road." Scientists are now… Continue reading

A woman was struck and killed by a Capital Corridor train in Hayward when the dog she was walking dragged her onto the tracks and into the path of the oncoming locomotive, according to authorities.  The fatal accident took place just hours after a pedestrian died from being struck by an Amtrak train in Berkeley.  According to Alameda County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. J.D. Nelson, at about 2:15 p.m. two people with a dog were attempting to cross the tracks ahead of an approaching train just north of the Hayward Station near the intersection of West Blossom Way and Meekland Avenue.  "The crossing guards were down. The gentleman was able to make it through," Nelson explained. "She tried to stop, realizing she probably couldn’t make it and the dog dragged itself and her into… Continue reading

A TAIWANESE carpenter bought a porn DVD only to find secretly taped motel footage of his wife having sex with his friend, whom the husband later stabbed, a newspaper has reported. The husband, identified only by his surname Lee, discovered the illicit sex on the DVD in 2002. The sexual acts apparently had been recorded using a hidden camera and were on a pornographic DVD, titled Affairs with Others' Wives, which the husband bought from a vendor to watch at home. Lee, who lives in Taoyuan County near Taipei, divorced his wife after viewing the DVD. His friend, a butcher, fled their village.  In August 2008, Lee spotted the butcher in Chungli City, returned with a knife and stabbed his former friend in the thigh. The butcher sued Lee for causing bodily harm. Lee sought… Continue reading

  The teenaged pranksters of 4chan.org's /b/ discussion board flooded YouTube with pornographic clips Wednesday and Thursday, according to various reports.   YouTube has strong filters and dedicated employees seeking out and deleting porn from the site, but it wasn't enough to handle the onslaught of uploading clips. To get around the filters, many of the clips appeared innocuous for the first 20-30 seconds, the tech blog Ars Technica reported, but then cut abruptly to hardcore sex scenes. A spokesman for Google, which owns YouTube, said most of the porn had been removed by Wednesday afternoon. "It may take some time for video search results and thumbnail images to disappear from the site," Scott Rubin told ArsTechnica. "Typically, this should not take more than a couple of days, but the videos themselves are no longer viewable." Read… Continue reading

  A webcam installed last year to broadcast live streaming video of Yellowstone National Park’s iconic Old Faithful Geyser around the world was instrumental in the arrest of six vandals last week. As seen in photos released today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), a group of six trespassers ventured off the visitor boardwalk; two apparently urinated and one dropped a rock into what is arguably the world’s most famous geyser.   Outraged by what they saw on their home computers on the evening of May 4th, viewers of theOld Faithful webcam contacted park officials who then dispatched park rangers. The trespassers were apprehended as they returned to the boardwalk twenty minutes later. According to PEER, the webcam footage shows that several of the “cone walkers” appeared to urinate on the geyser cone… Continue reading

  Exactly 15 years ago, on March 1994, Linux kernel version 1.0.0 was humbly released for the world to tinker with. To celebrate the historic moment, I have collected some really interesting facts about the Linux kernel. So if you are a Linux fan, grab a beer and read on.   1. A 21 year-old Finnish college student created the Linux kernel as a hobby. (Do you know him?) 2. An asteroid was named after the creator of the Linux kernel. 3. Thousands of developers/programmers scattered all around the world are continuously contributing to the development of the Linux kernel. 4. The Linux kernel's official mascot is a penguin named Tux. 5. According to a study funded by the European Union, the estimated cost to redevelop the most recent kernel versions would be at $1.14 billion USD. 6. As of today, only… Continue reading

Scope Attempts are frequently made to prescribe a ‘coding style’, often taking the form of a list of simple mechanical syntactic rules such as ‘operators shall be separated from their operands by a single space’ or ‘nested blocks shall be indented by precisely three spaces’. These attempts generally just reflect the particular preferences of the author, and his or her own ideas about what is ‘readable’ code and what is not. Readability, however, is in the eye of the beholder; what one programmer will regard as elegant and clear will be unusable to another. Any naïve set of rules, rigidly enforced, will alienate, annoy,    and reduce the productivity of more people than it pleases: a recipe for disaster. In this guide I shall try to show how a little intelligence can be applied to the… Continue reading

1. The size of googleplex / google headquarters is 129619 square meters, or 32.03 acres 2. They have their own Restaurant with Organic Meals that are served to all employees FREE. 3. They have 200,000 computers at their headquarters to cater for the massive amount of bandwidth needed to generate and support the millions of users online. 4. After Yahoo Secured a deal with AOL in 2004 (but without signing) to win the bid to take over the European Market, Google found out and flew in their private jet on the same day all the way to UK to convince AOL otherwise and gave them an offer they couldn’t refuse. Yahoo refused to get into a bidding war and let them get the better of it and win. 5. The staff at Google are… Continue reading

The Meaning of "Professional" So what does it mean to be a professional programmer? What does it mean to be a professional  anything? Some definitions simply say to be a professional is "to make money from a skill," but true professionals also have a set of qualities often described as "professionalism." In my opinion, these qualities are: trustworthiness, teamwork, leadership, communication, constant updating of skills, an interest in minimizing risks and accountability. Each of these effect the professional programmer in certain ways. Trustworthiness The concept of trustworthiness applies in several different ways for programmers. Can you be trusted with a job? To perform a task without someone checking up on you? Can you be trusted to ask for help when you need it? If you're given clients' data or have signed a non-disclosure agreement, then you are being  trusted… Continue reading

Spyware is like the new technological nuclear weapon on the internet. Spyware can not only damage the health of your computer but it can also steal your personal identity other personal information. Spyware is software that is hidden inside legitimate downloads that you come across on the internet. An example would be the growing number of file sharing programs and free mobile ring tone advertisements that you come across on the internet. If you have teenagers in your household, it's imperative that they know the dangers of using these programs as what takes 2 minutes to download and listen to, can take a good few hours to remove the damage left behind after being infected with spyware. Spyware can slip past anti virus programs and firewalls as it is created to… Continue reading