If you think that a tweet is just 140 characters of text? Think again. The developers building tools on top of the Twitter platform know that tweets contain far more information than just whatever brief status update, or something interesting that you felt the urge to share with your friends via the microblogging network.

map-of-a-tweet

With Apple about to announce its latest revolutionary product – the Tablet PC, its share value and earnings is bound to rise several times. But importantly, it will help many freelance programmers earn a fortune by developing apps for it.

iPhone apps are developed in Objective C.  However, there is an python implementation too. According to Wikipedia, Objective C is used only on Apple’s Mac OS x and iPhone OS.

Now with a tablet PC being added to its stable, the developers will have more flexibility and CPU power than the iPhone to develop killer apps. Already it is rumoured that the print media is looking forward to find a way to generate revenue from tablet PC.

So what is objective c? It is an OOP language which adds smalltalk like messaging to C. Here is a Primer on the language from apple and more detailed here.

Do you know the language? How do you find it?

HTML5 is going to include the tag rel=”noreferrer” . This tag will strip out the referrer information. That is the browser will not detect the referrer page. Mark Pilgrim writes in Dive into HTML5

rel=”noreferrer” “indicates that no referrer information is to be leaked when following the link.” No shipping browser currently supports this, but support was recently added to WebKit nightlies, so it will eventually be showing up in Safari, Google Chrome, and other WebKit-based browsers

It’s only use I think would be for BlackHat forums who will not want the target webmaster to know his source of traffic.

What do you think its use would be? Write in the comments.

Marks Pilgrim has written a book HTML5

When you are developing web applications you usually have to make  a choice between Java EE and .NET.  Here is some points you should take note of before you take the plunge.

.NET  relies on stored procedures, whereby in Java  preference is given to keep everything in domain objects outside the DB. On .Net side you can use NAnt or a proprietary MS tool.

In .NET you get everything from one vendor. Whereas in Java EE you get several IDE and implementations from SUN as well as other third party vendors.

You can get help from very helpful online Java community whereas you have to depend on MSDN for help in .NET .

You don’t have to search for a given solution in .NET. The choice is clear. It can save you a considerable amount of time. Whereas in Java you have to search for the right tool from the many tools that is available.

.NET tools description and  evaluation is given at MSDN whereas for Java you have to evaluate them yourself if you can’t trust reviews of strangers on the internet.

The UI best practices are more consistent in .NET than in Java. The language integration in .NET is seamless. You can  call methods from C# to VB.NET with ease. In Java it is difficult to call Scala functions from Groovy.

As for IDE you have several commercial and free IDE’s available for java but in the case of .NET. . . . .

Java integration is excellent. You get connectors for SAP, AS400, etc. for free. ESBs, LDAP servers are also free.

Java language very stable. There are no big changes. Java EE 5 and 6 platform is backward compatible.

You can choose whatever OS you want to for development and production in Java EE whereas you are forced to use Windows for .NET

Most of Java applications are built on open source tools but this is not the case with .NET.

With Java EE you are  vendor-neutral.  Java EE apps are extremely portable. Java EE is not even dependent on Sun Microsystems as it was developed by all major vendors.

This program makes use Caeser Cipher method for encrypting and decrypting data. From Wikipedia

It is a type of substitution cipher in which each letter in the plaintext is replaced by a letter some fixed number of positions down the alphabet. For example, with a shift of 3, A would be replaced by D, B would becomeE, and so on. The method is named after Julius Caesar, who used it to communicate with his generals.

Here is the program in python.

# Caesar Cipher – Simple Substitution Cipher

MAX_KEY_SIZE = 26

def getMessage():

print ‘Enter your message:’

return raw_input()

def getMode():

while True:

print ‘Do you wish to encrypt or decrypt a message?’

mode = raw_input().lower()

if mode in ‘encrypt e decrypt d’.split():

return mode

else:

print ‘Enter either “encrypt” or “e” or “decrypt” or “d”.’

def getKey():

key = 0

while True:

print ‘Enter the key number (1-%s)’ % (MAX_KEY_SIZE)

key = int(raw_input())

if (key >= 1 and key <= MAX_KEY_SIZE):

return key

def getTranslatedMessage(mode, message, key):

if mode[0] == ‘d’:

key = -key

translated = ”

for symbol in message:

if symbol.isalpha():

num = ord(symbol)

num += key

if symbol.isupper():

if num > ord(‘Z’):

num -= 26

elif num < ord(‘A’):

num += 26

elif symbol.islower():

if num > ord(‘z’):

num -= 26

elif num < ord(‘a’):

num += 26

translated += chr(num)

else:

translated += symbol

return translated

mode = getMode()

message = getMessage()

key = getKey()

print ‘Your translated text is:’

print getTranslatedMessage(mode, message, key)

input()

You can check out the code for finding out root of a number using Newton’s method of iteration in Python. This code cipher code is from the free ebook Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python

I am really beginning to like Python Programming Language. It is quite efficient in doing lot of tasks. Unfortunately, I don’t get to devote much time for learning it. Here is the code that will calculate the square root by newton method of iterations.

import random

a = float(raw_input(“enter a integer”))

x = random.randint(1,a-1)

while True:

print x

y = (x + a/x) / 2

if y == x:

break

x = y

raw_input()

Many new programming languages have developed in last two decades. Java, Python, Ruby, Lisp, etc have gained popularity for different reasons and purposes. Each language has its own band of followers like football teams fans who  try to bring other fans in their fold.

But any good programmer, especially of embedded systems, will tell you that even if you have mastered any of the ‘modern languages’ you must have good knowledge of C. Why?

Only C is close to assembly language. It is appropriate for 8 bit processors to 64 bit processors; in systems with bytes, kilobytes and megabytes of memory.

More over, it is fairly simple to learn(well, not as simple as python) and C-compilers are available for almost every processor in use, and there is a large body of C programmers.

But the real advantage of C over other high level programming languages is that C is ‘low level’ high level language. C gives you  high level of direct hardware control without being difficult to code inlike assembly languages.

In real time systems, where speed of execution is of high importance, C is necessary. You can use other language as front-end in these systems but C for the number crunching , performance critical components.

Here is the discussion on reddit about which language is an alternative to C in embedded systems.

I am a BSc IT student of Mumbai university. We don’t actually have to learn Python Programming language. Also you know that in India the fad is to learn Java, .NET, VB, etc. So why did I chose to learn Python?

Firstly, I was impressed when I came to know that Google’s algorithms are based on Python. NASA also uses it for various purposes.

But what really turned me on was the fact that Python is very easy to learn. I probed further and got to know more about it. Here are the reasons why you must learn Python even though there is not much scope in India as of now.

1. In Python there is no Types and Size like in C/C++. This makes programming whole lot easier.
2. Python programs are easier to undertstand. Making it useful in building large software in a team.
3. Most of the unnecessary coding is not required in Python making the programs shorter and development phase faster than any other old languages.
4. Python is portable. It will run on almost every OS without any issues. You can use Tkinter or WxPython to create GUI and it will work on all platforms. Compare this with VB which will work only in Windows.
5. Python script can call C/C++ libraries, use Java classes, integrate with .NET, etc.

After learning python, I am going to learn WxPython an Jython. You can learn Python from the official documentation you will get when you download Python from Python’s website. However, I found It difficult to understand.  I found this site Byte For Python was better for beginners. I have also purchased O’ Reilly’s Programming Python and Python in a Nutshell.  These books are bit advanced.