Here are some contests I found:

• The Fifth Underhanded C Contest – the scope is to write benign looking code which would pass trough a code-review (and/or there is plausible deniability for the coder), but which does some evil things. Found it via slashdot. Some of the previous solutions are ...

I won’t go as far as to say that the calendar system is arbitrary and there is no reason to follow it :-p, but I have to say that giving donations shouldn’t be limited to Christmas. So if are/get in a giving mood, here are some geeky ...

I just remembered what a Prodigy fan I was. The old man :-p doesn’t like it, but that’s ok. I don’t like Tokyo Hotel either :-)

The TwitFeeder has support for non-Twitter sources - crossposted from the TwitFeeder blog:

The TwitFeeder uses the Twitter API to get the different bits and pieces of information needed to generate the enhanced RSS feed. However Twitter isn’t the only one exposing the API:

• Laconi.ca (now Status.Net) is ...

Google is one of the “big three” integrated web hubs on the internet offering many services in one place, most of them free. Of course everything has it price (nothing is truly free) and these offerings being free means that they don’t guarantee a very end-user friendly SLA. For ...

If you are not familiar with the “Bob story” concept: I first heard about it on the Pauldotcom podcast, where Twitchy used to tell stories about how “Bob” went wardriving, created a fake AP and did other grayhat things. They may have taken the idea from somewhere, but this is ...

As the readers of the blog know, I’ve been slicing and dicing the Twitter RSS feed for some time. Finally I launched a free service which wraps all the improvements in one, easy to use and best of all, free (!) service: The Twit Feeder.

Cross-Posted from The Twit Feeder ...

Recently I’ve been looking around for a Java profiler (since the two things you need for a successful performance tuning session are good data and clear targets). I’ll share the notes about my findings in the hope that they might be useful for someone. Quick disclaimer: don’t ...

As they say: just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean that you’re not being watched! Here are a couple of links which freaked me out recently:

• Warily, and with much trepidation - a blogpost about how one deleted his facebook settings because of privacy concerns. I do have ...

or: does Thread.yield have its place in todays Java programs?

I was profiling a rather old legacy codebase (since the first rule of performance optimization is “profile it” with the close second of “have clear goals in mind” - but that’s an other post) and - after optimizing the first ...