It's been an unusual week. On Thursday I registered a new domain, did the usual webmaster thing by adding it to Google webmaster tools and on Friday, less than 24 hours later it was on the first page of Google.com at #2 position for a search (to be fair, an exact match to the domain) out of 840,000 results.

More interesting I was thinking about website scalability and read this article on storing schema less data and using a separate table for indexes.

Doing it this way avoids the huge problems with indexes on multi million row tables that can take hours to update. We had that at my last work where a very much used table could only be altered at weekends and even then it took well over 24 hours. Managing production data can be a real nigfhtmare some days!

I've been curating a list of free C Compilers and came across SubC today. This is a subset of full C and intended for teaching rather than production. It's recently added Windows support with MingW.

The author uses the compiler to teach about compiler construction in his book Practical Compiler Construction.

• Here's the full list of free C compilers

And I 've just realised that no one has missed the input.txt from challenge 70 (it will be there by Sunday evening!).

This month's challenge is about veruifying if html files are valid or have overlapping html tags. These are the tags your program must check: <div><span></span></div> is ok but <div><span></div></span> is not. The tags in question are limited to <div> tags, it should also handle <span>, <p>, <b>, <i> and <u> tags (and their closing tags).

• Read Programming Challenge 71 - Unweave tags
• Enter Programming Challenge 70 - Shoot the targets.

The Georgia Institute of Technology along with Udacity and AT&T will be offering the the first accredited Online Master of Science in Computer Science, for a cost estimated at under $7,000 starting in Fall 2014. It will be open to anyone in the world who has a BSc in Computer Science.

I'm not surprised, I've been expecting online education to start gaining accreditation. I wonder who will be first to offer a BSc? Even Jimmy Wales (the Wikipedia founder) thinks MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) are the way of the future.

For more details see the announcement.