Josh Wieder

Today we will learn a bit about Boolean values, operators and expressions. Boolean values and conditions are named after 19th century mathematician and logician George Boole who pioneered a field of logic now referred to as Boolean logic; which is based upon grouping and comparing * Boolean values *. * Boolean Value * - a variable that has two possible conditions;  TRUE and FALSE .                                Similar to a light switch that can be either on or off, or how binary                                numbers can be either 1 or 0. Boolean values are seem fairly simply on the surface. However, they allow for a dynamic array of combined values that allow for nearly infinite complexity. * Boolean Operator * - A Boolean Operator combines two Boolean values  into a single value. The two most common of such operators are AND and OR , but there are quite a few additional Operators we will explore as well. * AND * - results in a value of TRUE ONLY if BOTH input

There seems to be a great deal of confusion about what happened between Tamir Rice, a 12 year old who was playing in a park with a BB gun, and the police officer who killed him. Take, for example, this:  Quite a few members of the "public at large" seem to be convinced that young Tamir Rice was brandishing a convincing pistol replica at the police. The police, after begging Rice to lay down his weapon multiple times, were forced to open fire when young Tamir made some sort of furtive movement toward his waist band, in which this make-believe pistol was ensconced.  While I find it quite troubling that so many of our fellow citizens find it reasonable to leap to the defense of today's police force immediately after they gun down a pre-pubescent child, perhaps in this instance the Public can be forgiven. After all, the narrative described above has largely been formed from police statements of what happened.  Here's the police version: A man calls 91

Here is a quick tip for all of those Redhat/CentOS/Fedora users out there. Do you need to find all files over a certain size, either in a specific directory, your current directory, or in your entire computer/server? No problem, just execute the following: find / -type f -size +500000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }' In the example above, I am looking for all files over 500MB in size (500000k, where k = kilobytes). The place where I have typed "/" in the above command indicates the path to search in. By selecting "/" I am searching in the entire filesystem; I could easily indicate a specific directory by changing my command as follows: find /path/to/my/directory -type f -size +500000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ print $9 ": " $5 }' Alternatively, I could search in my current directory by replacing "/" with "." like so: find . -type f -size +500000k -exec ls -lh {} \; | awk '{ pri

The vile letter above speaks for itself. The letter you see above, published for the first time fully unredacted by the New York Times yesterday , was sent by the FBI to Martin Luther King Jr, in order to compel him to commit suicide. The letter was apparently enclosed with a recording that the FBI believed could provide King was cheating on his wife; the impetus for their suicide demand. The sections that have for decades remained redacted explicitly reference the tape - it becomes apparent that the only possible reason for censoring this material is that it contains proof that the FBI was conducting warrantless surveillance of US citizens for purely political reasons. Fortunately we live in an enlightened age where such warrantless eavesdropping is merely a curio of the distant past. Oh, wait ...

So last night (11-12-14) or this morning you ran a package of `Important` Windows Cumulative Security Updates. Gee those do sound important! There were about 11 or so - specifically, the ones most likely to give you trouble are these: Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3008627) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3003743) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2993958) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2991963) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3005607) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB2992611) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3010788) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3002885) Security Update for Windows 7 for x64-based Systems (KB3006226) After diligently downloading and installing these updates, you allow your computer to reboot. The boot process goes smoothly, you log into your computer, only to find a stark black s

Problems arise with numerical expression in computing. In reality, there are an infinite number of real numbers. However there is clearly not an infinite amount of infinite memory even in the largest of super-computers, and memory that is addressable by an application is only a fraction of the total finite available memory. How to we deal with these obstacles? We will explain more in a moment. First let's overview in more detail how the C compiler handles numeral types. Consider the application below: #include <stdio.h> int main (void) {     float f = 1 / 10;     printf("%.2f\n", f);     return 0; } Here we declare a float, 1/10 which should clearly resolve to 0.1 or 0.10 since I am declaring that printf provide a float with two digits after the decimal point. However, upon complation and excecution the program will stubbornly return a value of "0.00". Why? The issue is that I am declaring a float as an operation of two integers - 1 and

A 5 minute animated short film, called "The Box", recently won a well-deserved award from the New Orleans Film Festival . "The Box" is directed by Michael Schiller and produced in part by the Center for Investigative Journalism The film follows Ismael “Izzy” Nazario, a 16 year old child who spends 300 days in solitary confinement while imprisoned in Rikers Island. This time was done before Izzy was convicted of a crime. Izzy's mother had fallen victim to cancer before his arrest, leading Izzy to become less engaged in school and try to escape a suffocating situation at home by falling in with friends in the street. This lead to an arrest for theft. "The Box" uses powerful animation, scrawled in black and white like a sketching on a concrete wall. The images are reinforced by a voice over from Izzy, who describes confrontations with older prisoners who try to steal his shoes, how the ink on letters he received would run and smudge from sweat cause