Here is a great slideshow covering cryptography in great detail. It was shown at the BSDCan 2010 (BSD Conference 2010). It’s about 1 hour in length, which is somewhat long for a slideshow, but includes a bunch of really interesting information!

I do quite a bit of Linux/Unix systems administrator on a day-to-day basis. Over time you sort of find out that there are quite a few ‘common traits’ that apply to your usual set of Unix admins. Some examples: the use of Vi, use of Perl, restrained use of sudo, etc. I found a list over at infoworld.com that describes some of these ‘common traits’, actually some of them are kind of funny, but there are a few that are most definitely true. Check out the list for your self: Nine Traits of the Veteran Unix Admin (infoworld.com)

“Computer science is what enables programming, but it is possible to do a lot of programming without understanding the computer science concepts underlying the process of computation. This isn’t always a bad thing. When we program we work at a much higher level of abstraction. When we drive a car, we only concern ourselves with two or three pedals, a gearshift and a steering wheel. You can safely operate a car without having any clear idea of how it works. However, if you want to operate a car at the very limits of what its capabilities, you need to know a lot more about automobiles than just the three pedals, gearshift and steering wheel.

There are many Computer Science timelines out there that describe the major milestones in the field. Most of these detail things such as the founding of major companies involved in Computer Science. This doesn’t necessarily give us a good understanding of the true history of Computer Science and of the major breakthroughs which occurred after (and due to) a company’s founding. Check out the link below for a (huge!) timeline of Computer Science.

“Who invented the computer? For anyone who has made a pilgrimage to the University of Pennsylvania and seen the shrine to the ENIAC, the answer may seem obvious: John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert Jr., who led Penn’s engineering team in the 1940s. As it says on the plaque, the giant machine made of 17,468 vacuum tubes was the “first electronic large-scale, general-purpose digital computer.” But notice all the qualifying adjectives. Does this mean there was a smaller digital computer that actually came first?

If you are looking to get started with Javascript this tutorial is an excellent place to start. It’s dubbed “Javascript in 10 Minutes” and it teaches you the fundamentals of Javascript so you can quickly get into writing your own code. This tutorial is enough to get started with Javascript, but if you want to do any real work, you may want to invest in some good books or additional and hopefully more lengthy) tutorials.

This isn’t necessarily Computer Science related, but it is an article which I found interesting nonetheless. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of the article that gives you a good overview of what the entire 4-page article is about:

“We’re gathered in a conference room on the Berkeley campus, the detritus of a LAN party scattered around us. The table is covered with computers and pizza, and there’s a game of StarCraft projected on the screen. Oriol Vinyals, a PhD student in computer science, is commanding the Terran army in a life-or-death battle against the forces of the Zerg Swarm….

“The Facebook Hacker Cup is an annual Facebook programming competition where hackers compete against each other for fame, fortune, glory and a shot at the coveted Hacker Cup. Many will enter… only one will emerge as world champion.”