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Showing posts from June, 2016

Firecode - Ace the Coding Interview

Another code learning platform, in this case focused on preparing candidates for a job interview that involves writing code. What's different about it? Let's find out. After signing up, you have to choose the language you'll be working with. Only Java,C or Python are currently available, but the platform has immediate plans for beefing up its range of supported languages. Then you work through a mini series of questions in order to gauge your current knowledge and skills and establish an entry level for training and assessment best suited to your experience and knowledge. For example, choosing Java brings up the following: read the rest of the article on i-programmer.info

21 - Bitcoin For Everyone

21, a mixture between a platform, an app and a service, is setting out to become the third world wide web. It draws on the foundations of the www for inspiration, the first built on HTML, the second, the Social Web, built on personalization, and gazes  boldly into the future, paving the way for a third kind of the web, the one built on Bitcoin. As it stands, the world wide web cannot address the fundamental issue faced by content and service providers who base their businesses on it, namely financing. Providers have either to rely on ad enabled freemium content, or put their content behind a paywall as a subscriber only service. Both of these options had proved inefficient. full article on i-programmer

Ingres 11 detailed technical preview

Version 11 of Actian's Ingres open source RDBMS, is going to be a major release as indicated by the jump in the version number. The sequence goes 10.0.0, 10.1.0, 10.2 and from there to 11. This heralds quite a few changes and welcome additions. The technical preview available at the moment provides only the bare minimum of information, so we dug deeper and can now reveal the most important new features, as far as developers are concerned, broken down by category. full article on i-programmer

Blisk - The Developers Browser

Blisk is a new lightweight browser targeted solely at developers. It contains convenience functionality that eases the testing and debugging processes of building web pages. The most important feature of Blisk is the side by side mobile device and desktop screen emulation. The workspace is split in two with the mobile device space occupying the left hand side, while the desktop screen the right one. There are many mobile devices (phones and tablets) to choose from, ranging from Iphone4 to Samsung Galaxy S3 and Google Nexus. It's important to note that Blisk's device emulation is not the simple resizing of viewport's size but it accurately emulates: Screen resolution Device pixel ratio User agent Touch event! (you can test the user experience of working with touch screens) more on i-programmer

Neural Networks for Storytelling

A paper authored by a large team of Microsoft Researchers past and present, to be presented this week at the 15th Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2016), introduces Microsoft Sequential Image Narrative Dataset (SIND) and how it can be used for visual storytelling. full article on i-programmer

Apress "Java Closures and Lambdas" book review

A book that sets out to introduce programmers to the Functional Programming mindset looking through the eyes of Java. What will you get out of it? Although the emphasis is on lambdas, in this book Robert Fischer places them into the wider perspective of Java 8 which revolutionizes Java, adjusting its foundations by shifting from the pure OOP model to incorporate the functional one as well.  Lambdas of course lie at the epicenter of that revolution, responsible for the move from a conservative Java to a more succinct, versatile and performant programming paradigm.  This might be uncharted territory for Java, but not so for other languages, such as Perl. The author himself is a veteran Perl programmer who had long ago discovered Perl's functional programming (FP). His book is therefore a testimony to Perl's clairvoyance and innovative thinking that others re-discover many years, even decades, later. And that is the book's aim, to familiarize the Java programm

HackerRank - Advance Your Coding Through Problem Solving

This is very interesting proposition in the "learn to code" e-learning field. HackerRank uses a variety of methods to reinforce learning: hands-on problem solving through trial and error, gamification with points, ranking and awards and constructive competition through contests and hackathons, all combined combined into a single package. HackerRank's mission objectives are to help students improve their coding, make personal connections through interest sharing and team working, and, for high achievers, even the opportunity of job offers. There is no restriction as to where you start or what you can do concurrently and students can jump in from one of three potential entry points, depending on their level of experience in programming. full article on i-programmer

XSSHunter for pentesting

XSS Hunter is a recently launched platform that makes pentesting for XSS vulnerabilities much easier to monitor and organize. Through it you can launch all kinds of XSS attacks, but where it really shines is when carrying out a Blind XSS attack. A Blind XSS attack is a variation of the stored or persistent attacks and typically affects web applications that allows users to store data. It occurs when the attacker exploits a vulnerability which allows him to save his payload on the server's side (i.e in a database), subsequently served with the rest of the content of the affected page, this way affecting all those who visit the vulnerable web page. A booby-trapped comment posted in a public forum that when clicked triggers the exploit is a prime example. full article on i-programmer