Google’s Jonathan Rosenberg wrote a paean to ‘open,’ in which his company’s commitment to ‘open’ is pitched at great length. The most remarkable paragraph, however, is the one dealing with things that Google keeps closed:
While we are committed to opening the code for our developer tools, not all Google products are open source. Our goal [...]

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Mark Pilgrim traces the history of the humble IMG tag and the heated discussion that ensued when graphics were added to the web:
I’d like to propose a new, optional HTML tag:IMG
Required argument is SRC=”url”.
This names a bitmap or pixmap file for the browser to attempt to pull over the network and interpret as an image, [...]

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People tend to have the misconception that making an anagram gets harder the longer the sentence is – the opposite is true. The longer a sentence gets, the more possibilities there are for making small re-arrangements in the anagram to fit the original text. See this famous anagram:
To be or not to be: that is [...]

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Wikipedia can explain it.
Britain and the British Empire (including the eastern part of what is now the United States) adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752 by which time it was necessary to correct by 11 days. Wednesday, 2 September 1752 was followed by Thursday, 14 September 1752 to account for 29 February 1700 (Julian). Claims [...]

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Wow, there’s a whole competition for this? Damn, that’s awesome. Back in my day we simply wrote AI for Battleship or Prisoner’s Dilemma or even Tic-Tac-Toe.

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Minorly earth-shattering music/game news this morning from the Rock Band camp as they officially unveil The Rock Band Network, a new program for any musician or band to create their own Rock Band tracks and sell them through the game’s online store a new Rock Band Network store.
The Network will work alongside the Xbox 360’s [...]

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Thanks to some perseverance and asking the right questions, SJSU professors are now prohibited from barring students from posting their code solutions online, as well as penalizing their students for doing so. A win for students, programmers, and copyfighters nationwide!
Kyle’s a student at San Jose State University who was threatened with a failing grade for [...]

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After a long legal wrangle, some defendant-side attorneys have audited the source-code of Alcotest, the breathalyzer used in New Jersey DUI stops. Turns out it was programmed by muppets who don’t know how to calculate an average and who throw out error messages by the dozen.
Like voting-machine vendors, breathlyzer vendors go crazy when defendants ask [...]

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Attention NoScript users · by Wladimir Palant
Recently I wrote about how not giving extension developers a good way to earn money might lead to very undesirable effects. The recent events give an impression of the kind of effects we should expect here. This is going to be about the popular NoScript extension which happens to make [...]

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Secure application development initiatives are all the rage now, but will developers get “religion?”

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The rows of silver dials and tangle of scarlet wires look more like a telephone exchange.
But this is the inside of the Turing Bombe, the part-electronic, part-mechanical code-breaking machine and forerunner of the modern computer, which cracked 3,000 messages a day sent on Nazi Enigma machines during the Second World War.
There were 210 such bookcase-like [...]

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Installing Rails on Debian or Ubuntu is quite simple. To ensure that you have a Rails-compatible version of Ruby installed, do not install the old (and possibly broken) version of Ruby with apt-get/aptitude. Rather, install Rubygems and have it fetch Ruby for you. Again… Do not install rails using apt-get/aptitude! The debian repository includes a [...]

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As programmers, our code should be readable, not cryptic; but sometimes it’s fun to surprise, obfuscate or conceal. Wikipedia says:
Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no-one apart from the sender and intended recipient even realizes there is a hidden message. By contrast, cryptography obscures the meaning [...]

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Another story from printer-land of 20 years ago: this time about a seemingly impossible bug.
While working on the LPS-20 PostScript software, a bug was filed that said roughly,

Print the attached file. The LPS-20 will jam. You’ll have to open the printer to remove the scrunched up paper.

We were no strangers to jammed printers, [...]

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Whenever someone says they’re going to use a GUID for something, I make it a point to always respond, “No!  Don’t use a GUID there!  If you use one there, eventually you’ll use them all up and we won’t have any left!”
Of course, GUIDs don’t get “used up,” and there are plenty to go around [...]

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Jacob Appelbaum, one of the security researchers who worked on the paper cold boot attack on encryption keys (featured in a previous BBtv episode, above) tells us the code has just been released today at the [last] HOPE hacker con in NYC. It’s up, it’s signed, and here it is.
Memory Research Project Source Code

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Today I was toying with Apache and made a .htaccess for all of you; that prevents most used XSS and SQL injection vectors in the request uri. It looks at the request uri and sends the malicious user to a log file which sends an e-mail to the webmaster with all his information and what [...]

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I’ve always been into scripting things using random numbers based on random functions, like PHP’s “rand()” function… but I’ve never compared these types of functions to true random number generators. Then one day, I stumbled upon Random.org, which is a true random number generating service.
The difference is that most random number generating functions in programming [...]

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Finally a clean-room implementation of Google’s Page Rank Algorithm in Java, reverse-engineered from their numerous commentary on Page Rank.
public static int getPageRank(url) {
// start off with a random low PR
int pageRank = rand.getInt(0, 3);
if ( isHostedOn(‘google.com’, url) ) {
pageRank++;
} else if ( isHostedOn(‘microsoft.com’, url) ) {
pageRank–;
}
// Support valid pages
if (isValidPage(url) ) [...]

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Regular expressions are archaic-looking, extremely specific, and amazingly helpful for finding the right data, files or whatever else you need. RegEx, a free online regular expression tester, lets you hone your expression language and terms down, giving you a box to put testing text in and highlighting the words that match your query. For users [...]

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