An interesting challenge in cartography is getting data of the appropriate resolution. As Lewis Fry Richardson observed , the more precisely you measure the length of a coastline, the longer it appears; geographic shapes have infinite complexity. Digital displays, in contrast, are limited by pixels. Choosing too high…
Cryptanalyst Marc Stevens from the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, known for breaking the https security in 2008 using a cryptanalytic attack on MD5, analyzed the recent Flame virus this week.
In this post, we'll learn the basics of one of the most interesting machine learning algorithms, the genetic algorithm. This article is part of a series.
It's incomplete, but probably a reasonable place to start. If you think there's something that desperately need to be fixed then send me email and I'll look at it.
On the Hacker News leaderboard I'm currently in position #12 with 32,360 points. I was curious to find out how I ended up in that position...
2007 was a different time for languages. While Java held the popular crown, the mainstream programming community were still coming to terms with Java 6. Released 3 months earlier, it was very much an evolution of the Java 5 watershed. Its arrival heralded the end of life for Java 1.4 and represented an opportunity to…
I can't find this on the web, so here follows a note I wrote in 1991 of an odd event in my computing career. === There's no such thing as ba...
Wealthy cities seem to have it all. Expansive, well-manicured parks. Fine dining. Renowned orchestras and theaters. More trees. Wait, trees? I’m afraid
My first job at Microsoft was providing developer support for the early Windows SDKs. To do my job well, I spent hours studying the Windows SDK documentation, the Windows source code, and writing sample applications. I then spent hours poring over customers’ (such as Lotus, WordPerfect, and Computer Associates) code…
As part of the 2011 Wikimedia Summer of Research, we uncovered a possible correlation between the decline in new active editors that began in 2007 and the rise of warnings issued to new users by bo…
In my last blog post, I made a public stink about language in a so-called Declaration of Internet Freedom , which turned out to be some libertarians attempting to expand and develop the ideas in this Declaration of Internet Freedom . Mostly they did pretty well, except for one sentence they got completely wrong: “Open…
[UPDATE, added 15 June 2004: This page has been linked in some prominent places recently, and as a result I've received many submissions for inclusion in The Two Things List. Although I can't respond to everyone individually, I want to thank you all for your contributions. I hope that I will be able to update the list…
One's sentiment toward JavaScript flips between elegance and disgust without transiting intermediate states.
Automating releases, semantic version bumps, and API calls often involves configuring branch permissions and storing long-lived credentials in pipeline variables. Managing credential rotation adds an ongoing maintenance burden. Today, we’re introducing granular step-level permissions and container tokens in Bitbucket…
Project Gutenberg, for those of you that are not already familiar with it, is one of the single-most important community projects of the century: an attempt at creating a digital library of free bo…
Space Cybersecurity has become a prominent topic in the news, particularly when it comes to protecting space-related assets and technologies.
Apple quietly fixed the apps affected by corrupt App Store binaries in an interesting way.
