How one couple navigates the holiday season with little money or religion.

This one is an article by Stan Veit, former editor-in-chief of Computer Shopper magazine who were one of the first retailers to deal with the ‘new in the business’ Apple Computer in the late 1970s. In their own words by the magazine:

Stan Veit, Editor in Chief Emeritus of Computer Shopper, was the Editor in Chief of Computer Shopper magazine from 1983 to 1988, and Editor in Chief/Publisher from 1988 to 1990. Well before that, he was intimately connected to the personal computer revolution, a pioneer in the computer retail business who dealt with many of the industry’s movers and shakers (as well as many now-forgotten luminaries). Here, in the first in a series, he relates his experiences with two Steves, founders of a certain well-known computer behemoth…

Read it here.

Mossberg Says Innovation is the Key to Success During the Econaclypse

Under worm attack, US Army bans USB drives

Microsoft to Offer Free Virus Protection Software for Windows

Mac Viruses Continue to Lag Behind Windows Counterparts

Study: time kids spend online not wasted after all

If a problem can be divided into separate and unrelated parts , those parts can be run separately. That way, The problem is solved faster than if each part is run sequentially from the computer. This approach is known as parallel processing (doing more than one task in parallel to another). Now multi-core processors in a computer can perform this processing very easily.

But true parallel processing is very difficult to achieve. Many tasks have some kind of relationship with one another and can not be easily separated. Object oriented programming helps here because processing for a single object can be separated out from that for the others.

I found this very interesting paper written by ‘Boleslaw K Szymanski and Charles D Norton‘ titled Object Oriented Programming in Parallel Scientific Computing - An Overview of the Special Issue which you can read here. It really explains the topic a lot in detail.

This guide is for keeping a consistency and code manageability in the open source projects developed by Google using C++.  As explained in the guide:

C++ is the main development language used by many of Google’s open-source projects. As every C++ programmer knows, the language has many powerful features, but this power brings with it complexity, which in turn can make code more bug-prone and harder to read and maintain.

The goal of this guide is to manage this complexity by describing in detail the dos and don’ts of writing C++ code. These rules exist to keep the code base manageable while still allowing coders to use C++ language features productively.

This guide also serves the purpose of making the beginners understand the language’s conventions. Read the full guide here.

Chandrayaan-1 took this photo of Earth from Earth orbit on October 29, 2008 at 12:30 PM IST. Near the center of the disk is the northwestern coast of Australia; the Sun glints off the Indian Ocean adjacent to that coast.

It’s breathtakingly beautiful!

From ARPANET to Web 2.0, the evolution of Internet has given communication, commerce and entertainment a whole new meaning. CNET has prepared a list of 50 most significant moments of Internet history which focuses on the events that mattered the most in this epic journey which started 40 years back. This one is a must read.

Problem solving while programming, using object oriented design always starts with the questions like:

1. What Objects should be created to solve this problem?

For example, if we are making a project for arranging books in a library, then the objects that come to mind will be the books, the shelves we keep them in, inventory book, the catalog etc.

2. What are the properties of the object?

A property is something that defines the characteristics of the object. In our problem, a few properties are, the subject the book is based on, its author, the number of books a shelf can hold in, (more…)

I consider Ars Technica to be among the best technology related blog (and matter of fact, according to Technorati, it is). These guys do an excellent job covering a lot of news and topics mixing their own brand of hilarious humor in it. I first stumbled on this web site while searching for a review of iPod Nano. These guys had the best review available and not only that, they took the reviewing business so seriously that they actually ran the Nano over with a VW car to stress test it! That was some review. Ever since then, it’s been exactly three years now that Ars is my most regular source for all things technology.

Here is an excellent article explaining the basics of 64 bit computing by Ars: An Introduction to 64-bit Computing and x86-64.

Apple Developer Connection has this must read article, which is for everyone who is beginning to work with Ruby on Rails on Mac OS X Leopard.