When you bought your current computer, it probably didn't come with a manual on programming. Many of you will likely remember a computer from your youth that did - a TRS-80, Commodore 64, or PCjr perhaps. If you're a bit younger, you may remember puzzling over the source to "gorillas.bas" on a school computer or popping up "Hello World" in Visual Basic without being quite sure how that worked. Do you remember enjoying programming? Over the last few months competing on TopCoder, I've rediscovered some of that confusion and frustration - and glee.

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The arcane art of tracking takes what I like to think of as a hacker's approach to making music. The interface is primarily numeric, notes are entered via the keyboard, length, parameters, effects are often entered in hexadecimal notation, and code flies across the screen as if you were looking at the opening credits of The Matrix. What's not to like? This article is a tutorial for beginners, more specifically for nerds with no musical training, on how to start making electronic beats using the most sampled break in the history of recorded music.

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In February of 2005, the U.S. State Department published a proposed amendment, in the Federal Register, of U.S. passport regulations. The proposal sought public comment on the idea of embedding RFID chips in all newly-issued passports beginning in 2006.

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I. October 28, 2005: I am working on a project with three young programmers and a manager. The oldest of the programmers is more than ten years younger than I. The manager is older, but does not know much about programming beyond how to check our code out of subversion and type "make" to check our progress.

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Software engineering is not just a technical domain, but also an intensely social one. Once a project team grows beyond a single developer, the need arises to coordinate the parallel efforts of multiple contributors. To this end source code management tools exist.

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For years, I've had browser info and geolocation script on my web server that was a quick Perl/CGI hack. So normally, this script gets about a thousand hits/day, but there was a ten-fold increase starting October 4th, 2005. It continues to increase and a week later, there were 74,886 hits (almost one/second) from 8,206 unique IP addresses - YIKES! Complete data (including raw Apache log data) can be seen here.

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This is a first-person account of how IBM was able to con my execs out of millions of dollars. Gullible management tries to swim with the shark and gets chewed to pieces. Witness the exec-level FUD sales techniques and the $325/hr subcontractor labor bait and switch.

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Being involved in systems development in Java, I follow discussions on tools and techniques for testing code. One particular area of interest is mock-based approaches to unit testing, whereby you create simulacra of objects your code is dependent upon and use them to break dependencies so that you code may be tested in isolation. While going through some conference proceedings, I found this. And it shocked me to no end...

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Since Google decided to use SOAP/XMLHTTP for their new map interface the geek web has been flooded with AJAX articles. Here I will discuss the importance of AJAX as well as some of the tradeoffs developers will encounter if they choose to use this technology. More importantly, I have also posted a version of this article with a running demo on my website (recommended). You can also download the article source and try it for yourself.

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New media formats such as HD-DVD and Blu-ray promise large capacities of space, at a cost. These new discs will be locked down using one method that dynamically updates the encryption system being used in your player. How this is implemented is still up in the air, but you can bet it is going to lean strongly on the side of protecting the contents of the disc at any cost. New audio CDs have special copy protections that make ripping tracks very difficult if not impossible. The broadcast flag was almost implemented this year, which would have restricted what you could and couldn't do with your TV. Some new software comes encrypted and crippled unless it calls home to the developer. We also have pictures with blaring watermarks obscuring the image yet informing the viewer of where the image came from. And finally, there are the laws making it illegal to tinker with these content restriction systems.

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