Lessons From Parallelizing Matrix Multiplication

Very cool example:
Before you dismiss this as yet another boring matrix multiplication example, consider that this, this, this and a lot of other tutorials on the web all use a naive version of matrix multiplication and then attempt to parallelize that version of it to demonstrate how to speed things up using some technology.

Cool pic

This is what I always think a working programmers office would look like LOL!

GPU mode support on Macintosh OSX 10.6

Main reason Flash is slow sometimes in new version of Macosx:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/498/cpsid_49832.html

Computational Complexity and Quantum Compuation

Cool some more video's I probably don't have time to watch but interesting nonetheless!
Computational complexity is the study of what resources, such as time and memory, are needed to carry out given computational tasks, with a particular focus on lower bounds for the amount needed of these resources. Proving any result of this kind is notoriously difficult, and includes the famous problem of whether P = N P . This course will be focused on two major results in the area. The first is a lower bound, due to Razborov, for the number of steps needed to determine whether a graph contains a large clique, if only “monotone” computations are allowed. This is perhaps the strongest result in the direction of showing that P and N P are distinct (though there is unfortunately a very precise sense in which the proof cannot be developed to a proof of the whole conjecture). The second is Peter Shor’s remarkable result that a quantum computer can factorize large integers in
polynomial time

Mathematicians Prove Tetris Is Tough

No wonder I never really liked Tetris LOL!
I figured it was a hard game but Minesweeper is NP-hard too and I like to play that though?
Mathematicians Prove Tetris Is Tough

Apple job of the day

Web Developer, iPhone/iPod Touch

Requirements:

• 4 year computer science/software engineering degree or equivalent work experience.
• Professional web application development experience.
• Experience with Ruby, PHP and JavaScript.
• Experience designing and implementing browser-based user interfaces using AJAX, ReST, and/or JSON.
• Relational Database experience with one of the following: SQLite, MySQL, Postgres or Oracle.
• Experience with Unix shell scripting (bash/sh/csh).
• Mac OS X & iPhone development (Objective-C) experience is a plus.

Am I In the Wrong Degree Program?

A degree program that you enjoy is the right program for you

Google's Go

Big news for developers out there: Google has just announced the release of a new, open sourced programming language called Go. The company says that Go is experimental, and that it combines the performance and security benefits associated with using a compiled language like C++ with the speed of a dynamic language like Python. Go’s official mascot is Gordon the gopher, seen here.
Sounds cool but they need a Windows version since it seems to be Linux and Mac only for the moment.

Finding shortest path

Good explanation:
Finding the shortest route

13 Tools for Building Your Own iPhone App

If you don't want to go to all the trouble of learning Objective-C here's some alternatives:
These days, everyone wants to build their own iPhone applications, but not everyone knows how write the code necessary in order to create them. Fortunately, there are now a number of tools that allow non-developers the ability to create their own iPhone apps without knowing programming or scripting.

Visual Studio 2008 for Gaming: Developing 3D Games

Some more video's I found:
Welcome to Visual Studio for gaming, how to get started developing 3D games. The purpose of this session is to provide an overview and introduction to developing games that are 3D using XNA Game Studio. To do that I’ve broken the session into three distinct components: The graphics, where we’ll talk about models and meshes, textures and shaders; The math, where we’ll try to wrap our heads around 3D space and the 3D pipeline; and finally The game itself, and that is the object model of the XNA Framework and what it looks like to manipulate the graphics and the math in the game that you create using XNA Game Studio.

What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic

This was probably one of the most difficult concepts in my Computer Architecture class so I'm not suprised there is some confusion:
Floating-point arithmetic is considered an esoteric subject by many people. This is rather surprising because floating-point is ubiquitous in computer systems. Almost every language has a floating-point datatype; computers from PCs to supercomputers have floating-point accelerators; most compilers will be called upon to compile floating-point algorithms from time to time; and virtually every operating system must respond to floating-point exceptions such as overflow. This paper presents a tutorial on those aspects of floating-point that have a direct impact on designers of computer systems. It begins with background on floating-point representation and rounding error, continues with a discussion of the IEEE floating-point standard, and concludes with numerous examples of how computer builders can better support floating-point.

PowerShellPack

Introducing the Windows 7 Resource Kit PowerShell Pack

Game Programming with Silverlight

Fun stuff!

GMP Install Instruction for Windows Platform

GMP Install Instruction for Windows Platform

C# BigInt: A GNU Multi-Precision Library for .NET

The GNU Multi-Precision Library for .NET is a .NET wrapper (written in C#) of the GNU MP Bignum Library, which is probably the fastest general purpose large number arithmatic library in the world. Below, you can download the wrapper along with a pre-built DLL of GNU MP.

Installing Utilities and SDK for Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications

Supposed to work with Windows 7?

Installing and Using Utilities and SDK for UNIX-based Applications

Learn to install and use the add-on called Utilities and SDK for UNIX-based applications.

FreeBSD adds support for Snow Leopard's Grand Central Dispatch

This is big news.
Now it's the developers turn to take advantage of it.
Apple's Grand Central Dispatch technology, which debuted in Snow Leopard as a mechanism for optimizing parallelism across multiple cores and processors, has now been ported to FreeBSD.

Beginner Developer Learning Center

Microsoft's actually got a lot of useful video's here if you got time to go through them.
Too bad they force you to use Silverlight to watch them though:(

Difference between a computer scientist and a programmer?

Duct Tape Programmers and the Culture of Complexity in Software Projects
I guess a progammer employed by a company or himself actually has to ship a program in a reasonable time period vs a computer scientist like Knuth can spend years figuring something out and perfecting it before showing it to the world.

How Win7's "Boot to VHD" Feature has Changed the Way I Work

Might come in handy. Will have to try it.
Boot to VHD.

Why Johnny can't code

Food for thought.
BASIC used to be on every computer a child touched -- but today there's no easy way for kids to get hooked on programming.
Yeah wasn't it burned into the ROM or something I thought?

Java VisualVM

Looks cool will have to check out.

Words of wisdom

Advice to Young Men from an Old Man

History of Visual Studio

Pretty cool.
History of Visual Studio

Flash for iPhone is a Hail Mary pass for Adobe

Is flash finally coming to the iphone?
maybe

Problems with SQL Server Express user instancing and ASP.net Web Application Projects

Some critical info to know for Windows web developers.
Microsoft recommends that the workarounds described in this article only be used to unblock affected development scenarios. When deploying applications into production on any version of IIS, SQL Server Express user instances should not be used.

The configuration of application pools on IIS 7.5 production web servers should use either the new application pool identity, or custom created user accounts. Application pools on IIS 7.5 production web servers should no longer run as NETWORK SERVICE.

The workaround described for working with WAP projects and websites located in a user's Documents folder should be used as a temporary workaround only. From a security standpoint it is not desirable for NETWORK SERVICE to have read access to all of the sub-folders within the Visual Studio Projects folder. The recommendation is to move IIS-hosted WAP projects and websites to a different file location that is normally accessible to an IIS service account (e.g. under c:\inetpub\wwwroot).

fallout trilogy easter egg

Funny LOL
Guy shows up in games after you install in vista or win7.

fgwlib working on macosx snow leopard

Okay I finally got this library from "You can do it" programming book working on my mac!!!
This is how I did it.
I modified the make file that was included on the cd for Linux slightly.
After that created the libfgw.a static library I testd it out on the cross program that creates a cross in playpen by typing:
g++ -c cross.cpp -o cross.o
then
most important and complex commandline!
g++ -o cross cross.o libfgw.a -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lX11

after that just type
./cross to see X11 pop up running a cross i macosx snow leopard!

anyways here is the modified makefile. only change really is adding an all to actually make it build the static library. Don't know why the original was missing it?
CC = g++

AR = ar

DEL = rm

OBJ_DIR = ./
OUTPUT_DIR = ./
OUTPUTFILE = libfgw.a
C_INCLUDE_DIRS =
C_PREPROC =
CFLAGS = -pipe -Wall -g0 -O2 -frtti -fexceptions
RC_INCLUDE_DIRS =
RC_PREPROC =
RCFLAGS =
ARFLAGS = rcs


NULL = nul

SRC_OBJS = \
$(OBJ_DIR)/adler32.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/deflate.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/flood_fill.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/infblock.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/infcodes.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/inffast.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/inflate.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/inftrees.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/infutil.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/line_drawing.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/minipng.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/playpen.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/point2d.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/point2dx.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/shape.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/trees.o \
$(OBJ_DIR)/zutil.o

define build_target
@echo Creating library...
@$(AR) $(ARFLAGS) "$(OUTPUT_DIR)/$(OUTPUTFILE)" $(SRC_OBJS)
endef

define compile_source
@echo Compiling $<
@$(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(C_PREPROC) $(C_INCLUDE_DIRS) -c "$<" -o "$@"
endef

.PHONY: print_header directories


all: $(SRC_OBJS)
$(build_target)


.PHONY: clean cleanall

cleanall:
@echo Deleting intermediate files for 'build_fgw - $(CFG)'
-@$(DEL) $(OBJ_DIR)/*.o
-@$(DEL) "$(OUTPUT_DIR)/$(TARGET)"
-@rmdir "$(OUTPUT_DIR)"

clean:
@echo Deleting intermediate files for 'build_fgw - $(CFG)'
-@$(DEL) $(OBJ_DIR)/*.o

print_header:
@echo ----------Configuration: build_fgw - $(CFG)----------

directories:
-@if [ ! -d $(OUTPUT_DIR) ]; then mkdir $(OUTPUT_DIR); fi
-@if [ ! -d $(OBJ_DIR) ]; then mkdir $(OBJ_DIR); fi

$(OBJ_DIR)/adler32.o: adler32.c \
zlib.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/deflate.o: deflate.c \
deflate.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/flood_fill.o: flood_fill.cpp \
playpen.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/infblock.o: infblock.c \
zutil.h \
infblock.h \
inftrees.h \
infcodes.h \
infutil.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/infcodes.o: infcodes.c \
zutil.h \
inftrees.h \
infblock.h \
infcodes.h \
infutil.h \
inffast.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/inffast.o: inffast.c \
zutil.h \
inftrees.h \
infblock.h \
infcodes.h \
infutil.h \
inffast.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/inflate.o: inflate.c \
zutil.h \
infblock.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/inftrees.o: inftrees.c \
zutil.h \
inftrees.h \
inffixed.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/infutil.o: infutil.c \
zutil.h \
infblock.h \
inftrees.h \
infcodes.h \
infutil.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/line_drawing.o: line_drawing.cpp \
line_drawing.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/minipng.o: minipng.cpp \
minipng.h \
zlib.h \
playpen.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/playpen.o: playpen_unix1.cpp \
playpen.h \
mouse.h \
keyboard.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/point2d.o: point2d.cpp \
fgw_text.h \
point2d.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/point2dx.o: point2dx.cpp \
point2dx.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/shape.o: shape.cpp \
flood_fill.h \
line_drawing.h \
point2dx.h \
shape.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/trees.o: trees.c \
deflate.h \
trees.h
$(compile_source)

$(OBJ_DIR)/zutil.o: zutil.c \
zutil.h
$(compile_source)

Microsoft is really trying to hold on to developers

Seems like Microsoft is trying to get back some of the progammers that switched to PHP or Ruby:
Announcing the WebsiteSpark Program
What does the program provide?

WebSiteSpark provides software licenses that you can use for three years at no cost. Once enrolled, you can download and immediately use the following software from Microsoft:

* 3 licenses of Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition
* 1 license of Expression Studio 3 (which includes Expression Blend, Sketchflow, and Web)
* 2 licenses of Expression Web 3
* 4 processor licenses of Windows Web Server 2008 R2
* 4 processor licenses of SQL Server 2008 Web Edition
* DotNetPanel control panel (enabling easy remote/hosted management of your servers)
As long as your company has less than 10 employees it looks like you could get a lot of free software.

Microsoft Visual Express C++

Here's a link to the Microsoft video that shows you how to create and run a simple console C++ program:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/beginner/bb964629.aspx

Has a good tutorial on using the debugger too.

Venn Diagrams explained

Easy way to visualize Venn Diagrams ;)
Nerd Venn Diagram

Game building tools for Mac

Wow Apple now actually has suggestions on gaming macs now :)