Josh Wieder

What does it mean for an algorithm to be "fast" or "efficient"? When we say an algorithm is fast, we are not referring to an explicitly notation in time, like seconds or minutes. There is a distinction here because of the distinction between hardware and software - performance of a program in real time can be drastically impacted by the hardware it is running on. In order to account for this distinction, while still providing an objective measurement for the efficiency of a program, computer scientists rely on Asymptotic Measurement and a notation format called Big O Notation to describe such measurements. The formal description as a formula is as follows: f(x) ∈ g(x) x o C f(x) ≤ C • g(x) x > x o In less theoretical terms; as the size of your input increases toward infinity, how does the runtime of your program grow? For example, imagine counting the number of characters in a string in the most simple way, by reading each character and summi

Looking for an apache log visualization program recently, I came across logstalgia. It turns your log files into a game of Pong between your web server and the internet, with each new request being the ball going back and forth! So cool.

Every time you see me, you want to mess with me. I'm tired of it. It stops today. Why would you...? Everyone standing here will tell you I didn't do nothing. I did not sell nothing. Because everytime you see me, you want to harass me. You want to stop me [ garbled ] Selling cigarettes. I'm minding my business, officer, I'm minding my business. Please just leave me alone. I told you the last time, please just leave me alone. please please, don't touch me. Do not touch me. [ garbled ] I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe.

Paid FBI informant , accused sex criminal and convicted embezzler Sigurdur Thordarson , who was paid thousands of dollars by his DOJ handler for 8 hard drives filled with internal Wikileaks documents , bears an uncanny resemblance to Augustus Gloop from Willy Wonka. Coincidence, or something more sinister ? Augustus Gloop , formerly of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory Sigurdur Thordarson , formerly of Wikileaks

When UNIX co-progenitor and super-smarty-pants Ken Ritchie was given a Turing Award, he provided a warning to those within ear shot. Admins and developers often find it satisfactory to review the source code of applications to determine maliciousness. And to a certain extent, this works out all right. Over time we have built a series of expectations of where to expect naughty code based on our experience. We have also chosen to trust other types of tools that we use during this process. We discriminate. But there's no reason that bad stuff *has* to be in the applications that we expect to find it in. Yes, the clever among us know that compilers can be bad. But we check the source of our compilers and find no bad stuff, and so we assume we are safe. We do, though, compile the compiler, don't we? Well, alright then some megalomaniac at Intel or somewhere far upstream decided to embed badness in the embedded distro compilation software. We can still look at the binary of com

Lately, I've been hooked on a brilliant comic book from genius Matt Kindt , called Mind MGMT . In a nutshell, Mind MGMT follows a cold war era intelligence service based on the conceit that Men Who Stare at Goats -style ESP spook tactics work, and have silently and secretly played a role in the machinations of world politics throughout the 20th century. Mind MGMT is really clever, the art is striking and the whole business is worth a read on its own. Part of the fun of the comic book is that the creators seamlessly weave the sort of subliminal messaging they use in the plot, into the layout of the comic itself. Fake advertisements in the back of issues contain hidden text, while the margins themselves are formatted like Scantron documents with little limericks where the dotted "fold here" lines usually go. Just today I read through issue 23, which opens with a tale of a man gifted with the fore-mentioned spying super-powers; a reclusive Bobby Fischer type who commun

In its simplest sense Typecasting is altering a computer's interpretation of data by implicitly or explicitly changing its data type; for example, by changing an `int` to a `float` and vice verse. To better understand typecasting, we must start with data types themselves. In programming languages like C, every variable has some kind of `type` that determines how the computer and the user interprets that variable. Each of these data types, for instance `int`, `long long`, `float` and `double` all have their own unique characteristics and are use to handle data types of various ranges and precision. Typecasting allows us to take a floating point number, like 3.14, and specifying the number before the decimal - 3 - by parsing it to an `int`. Let's us an example from the English language to better clarify what we mean. example.         WIND Each carefully manipulated line in the example above forms a unique symbol. However, these symbols are immediately identifiable