Of the top ten winners at the 2008 ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ACM ICPC) competing to be the best computer programmers in the world, four teams were from Russian universities, one was from Ukraine, a former member of the USSR, and three were teams representing universities in North America, including Canada and the United States. First place went to St. Petersburg University of Information Technology, Mechanics and Optics (Russia), followed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S.), Izhevsk State Technical University (Russia), Lviv National University (Ukraine), and Moscow State University (Russia). Also among the top ten finishers were teams from Tsinghua University (China), Stanford University (U.S.), University of Zagreb (Croatia), University of Waterloo (Canada), and Petrozavodsk State University (Russia). This international competition, now in its 32nd year, is hosted by ACM (the Association for Computing Machinery), a society of 88,000 computing educators, researchers, and professionals worldwide.
While doing my daily shifts in the World Wide Web and buzzering out of world class music with my surrounding sound system dancing all around my desk, I cracked out of my seat – again while still in music mood – with great news from Google jumping of my screen. That thing that came out my screen, that tiny little piece of text, that title is “Google Releases Language Translation API”.
The language API supports many languages such as Arabic, Chinese, France, Russian, and Korean and of course English. As clearly as their announcement is, it support 12 languages and cover 29 translation pairs and it is extremely easy to use for programmers.
For more information on how to use the API, you can check out the official documentation here. Be advised, it is made for Javascripters.
Finally Apple has released its long awaited iPhone SDK. You can download it from here. Unfortunately, contrary to other blogs that reported the announcement, the SDK is not free even though you are using it for nonprofit projects. That just great Apple… why not suck all our credits in our bank account?!
I’m working on a web site using JSP and I found this great article that should be helpful for JSP programmers.
Typical Web applications require the use of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and JavaScript, together with a server-side framework, such as JavaServer Faces (JSF). CSS lets you change the visual characteristics of Web components within Ajax and other applications so they can have a pleasant and distinctive look. In the first installment of this two-part series, find out how to use the CSS-related attributes of standard JSF components. In addition, learn how to create a custom JSF component that sets the default styles of nested components, making it very easy to ensure a consistent look for all pages of your Web application. You can also use this technique to programmatically set other component attributes, as you’ll see in Part 2, which will show how to make JSF forms more dynamic using JavaScript.
DotNetBoom and ProRangers are going to hold a Community Open Day for developers and IT professionals in February 16th, 2008 in Kuwait. It seems that there will be lots of activities as the schedule shows, but it will be limited to Microsoft products and solutions.
This tour, is packed with live demonstrations and technical content on the upcoming and much anticipated solutions from Kuwait MVPs.
Get a sneak peek into technologies that include Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, .Net, Silverlight, Virtualization and more. You will also be among the first to see us unveil the new Unified Communications technologies from MVPs – a solution that will revolutionize the way people communicate and collaborate in the workplace.
If you’re an IT Professional or a Developer looking to gain insight and an edge over others, then you’ve got no excuse to miss out on this event! You may even walk away as the lucky winner of a new XBox 360 Arcade!!
RedmondDeveloper News has recently published an interview with James Gosling, the creator of the Java programming language. He talks about JavaFX, the technology that will compete Flash and Silverlight. He is in the developer team of JavaFX and in his perspective:
If you look at something like Flash, when you get to the much more advanced stuff — with richer interfaces, more complex network protocols, more complex APIs — it really falls short.
I can’t say if I agree or not. I haven’t worked with JavaFX yet, it’s not even out yet.
I’m trying to form a team for Imagine Cup 2008 contest sponsored by Microsoft. I’m currently looking for 2 out of 4 students to join the team, if anyone interested please contact me or leave a comment with your email or phone number.
You don’t have to know .NET programming as we are going to train together one of the .NET tools. But you have to be a Kuwait University Student, undergraduate or studying master, and you need some experience in any other programming languages.
