Micropost

In the history of computer games some games have created and carried whole companies on their shoulders. One of those games is certainly Mario Bros. The Mario character first appeared in the game Donkey Kong and became very famous within its own game series starting with the original Mario Bros. in 1983. Nowadays a lot of spin-offs and 3D jump and runs are being produced centering the Mario character. In this article we will develop a very simple Super Mario clone, which is easily extendible with new items, enemies, heros and of course levels. ...

Historically, regular expressions are one of computer science’s shining examples of how using good theory leads to good programs. They were originally developed by theorists as a simple computational model, but Ken Thompson introduced them to programmers in his implementation of the text editor QED for CTSS. Dennis Ritchie followed suit in his own implementation of QED, for GE-TSS. Thompson and Ritchie would go on to create Unix, and they brought regular expressions with them. By the late 1970s, regular expressions were a key feature of the Unix landscape, in tools such as ed, sed, grep, egrep, awk, and lex. ...

El micro-código corresponde tradicionalmente con la forma más ”pura” de firmware, instrucciones al fin y al cabo, que controlan una máquina. Si no te suenan los términos, puede ser una lectura interesante si quieres conocer cómo funciona un procesador. Pero no es de hardware de lo que quiero hablar, sino de una forma (curiosa u obvia, de ti depende) de escribir ciertas partes de nuestros programas, que toma la idea básica de las lógicas micro-programadas. ...

Para contactar a otra persona a través de Internet, debe escribir una dirección en su ordenador: un nombre o un número. Esa dirección tiene que ser única para que los ordenadores sepan cómo encontrarse entre sí. ICANN se ocupa de coordinar estos identificadores únicos en todo el mundo. Sin esa coordinación no tendríamos una Internet global. Al escribir un nombre, un sistema debe traducir ese nombre en un número antes de que se pueda establecer la conexión. Ese sistema se denomina Sistema de nombres de dominio (DNS) y traduce nombres como www.icann.org en números, denominados direcciones IP (sigla que corresponde a Protocolo de Internet). ICANN coordina el sistema de direcciones para garantizar que sean únicas. ...

Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. ”Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, ”Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”… Damn kids. They’re all alike. But did you, in your three-piece psychology and 1950’s technobrain, ever take a look behind the eyes of the hacker? Did you ever wonder what made him tick, what forces shaped him, what may have molded him? I am a hacker, enter my world… Mine is a world that begins with school… I’m smarter than most of the other kids, this crap they teach us bores me… Damn underachiever. They’re all alike. ...

La Hackstory es una enciclopedia online que versa sobre la cultura e historia hacker, con especial atención a las iniciativas, grupos, anécdotas y puntos de encuentro hispanos. La estamos creando desde finales del verano de 2008, en nuestro tiempo libre, y ya llevamos entrados unos 200 artículos. Tenemos 18.000 visitas mensuales, 580 al día. En nuestro proyecto, la palabra ”hacker” no es sinónimo de delincuente, sino de persona experta y entusiasta con la tecnología, de alguien muy habilidoso con las herramientas que brindan la informática y las telecomunicaciones. Si quieres saber más, puedes consultar nuestra definición en hackstory.net/index.php/Hacker ...

Using an Arduino and an 8x8 matrix display from Adafruit (with I2C backpack), we display all the solutions to the classic 8-Queens problem (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_queens_puzzle ) A solution to the 8 Queen problem is where 8 queens are placed on a chess board so that no queen can take any other queen. » @stormingrobots | youtube.com

This is a short documentary about the LEGO Turing Machine built by Jeroen van den Bos and Davy Landman at Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam (Netherlands). They built it for CWI’s exposition ”Turings Erfenis” in honor of the centenary of Alan Turing’s birth on 23 June 1912. Alan Turing was a brilliant mathematician who helped define the theoretical model of the computer as we know it today. He was a visionary, one of the few people of his time who recognized the role the computer would play for humanity. The Turing Machine (1936) is an adequate model of a computer. It can do anything the computers of today or tomorrow can do. ...

I’ve been wondering for some time whether the power consumption of an ATmega varies depending on the code it is running. Obviously, sleep modes and clock rate changes have a major impact – but how about plain loops? » jeelabs.org

”This is a free minix-like kernel for i386(+) based AT-machines,” began the Linux version 0.01 release notes in September of 1991 for the first release of the Linux kernel. ”As the version number (0.01) suggests this is not a mature product. Currently only a subset of AT-hardware is supported (hard-disk, screen, keyboard and serial lines), and some of the system calls are not yet fully implemented (notably mount/umount aren’t even implemented).” Booting the original 0.01 Linux kernel required bootstrapping it with minix, and the keyboard driver was written in assembly and hard-wired for a Finnish keyboard. The listed features were mostly presented as a comparison to minix and included, efficiently using the 386 chip rather than the older 8088, use of system calls rather than message passing, a fully multithreaded FS, minimal task switching, and visible interrupts. Linus Torvalds noted, ”the guiding line when implementing linux was: get it working fast. I wanted the kernel simple, yet powerful enough to run most unix software.” ...