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David Bolton
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Programming Challenge 29 Updated

Wednesday November 25, 2009

I've got two others to run and will add them tonight- Michael Chock and James C. Congrats to Kovacs who has nudged ahead but it is a pretty close field! Still time for more entries.

Link to Programming Challenge Twenty Nine Manage the Hunters

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As part of the Chromium project Google is releasing an Operating System. This is based on Linux however it is highly secured so the only applications that can run on it are web apps. Does this include Flash or Silverlight? Its meant for people who spend their time browsing the web, not writing applications. Thus it's not a challenge to Windows, Mac OS X or Linux. Cynics of course cite the analogy of the original iPhone which didn't run Apps locally and look what happened with the App store and the 2nd generation iPhones which took off.

In that sense Chrome OS is like the Android phones which could only run Java applications though Google did subsequently publish a native NDK which let developers write part of their apps in C or C++. So Goolge Chrome OS could spur development in Silverlight.

The design docs make for an interesting read particularly about system security. This has been a key element with the Google Chrome browser and they're using lessons learned from that. Trying to keep the user safe on the web is a challenging problem, though easier for Chrome OS devices as the underlying Linux has been hardened. This make it very difficult for malware to get on the device and even if that happens, it will be unable to do very much. This is defense in depth, much like very large military bases that have an outer fence and then extra defenses around each of the installations within the base.

Silverlight 2 source code library

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A Very Clever Web App

Monday November 23, 2009

One of the most ingenious web sites (in Flash) is Zoomii.com which lets you visually browse 32,000 book covers from Amazon and then view the book details. It solves a fundamental problem: how do you browse books on the web (instead of searching) like you would walking around a bookshop?

Unfortunately for me, my favorite bookshops in the UK (Borders) are now being closed down and it's probably the web that's done them in. It's not a great situation because you really want to see what's in a book before buying it online.

The point is not that it's Flash (it could possibly be done in Silverlight or a client application running on a desktop) but that it solves a problem previously unsolvable. In this case, Amazon's web services make this possible. Talking of which you can now get the Amazon .NET SDK with .NET source code to interact with AWS (Amazon Web Services).

Link to C# Code Library

PS- We've five more Challenge 29 entries and I've marked half. Update tomorrow.

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Readers Open Source Projects Revisited

Sunday November 22, 2009

As I said a couple of weeks back, if anyone wrote to me about their open source projects in C, C++ and C#, I'd give them publicity and the first three are now up on a new open source projects page and all are in C++. It makes me wonder if this is just a statistical quirk ( that most open source projects are in C++), perhaps because ones in C (Apache, Linux, MySQL) started ages ago and C# hasn't been around as long as C++. Looking at the code library page the ratio is roughly 5:4:3 (C++ to C to C#) but that probably indicates my trying to be even handed. As the numbers increase I'll split them into a page for each language.

Also lots more entries for Challenge 29 so I'll update those by tomorrow night. Keep sending them in! Both open Source Project information and Challenge 29 entries.