Tag: ACM article

Making a Larger Island – Java

Hello everybody. I have been very busy looking into a problem at work which seemed to be caused by sockets. It seems that the issue might be related to encryption. Have a couple tests that should verify my assumption. Will let you know if that pan out.

Today in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul we woke up with a temperature above 0F (7F). Looking at the weather forecast it seems like the sub zero temperatures will be a thing of the past in a day or so. Weather forecasts are based on models and models in general are far from perfect, but they provide us with an idea of what might happen in the specified future. Continue reading “Making a Larger Island – Java”

Binary Tree Maximum Path

It is a Saturday morning in what has been forecasted so far as the coldest weekend of this winter season in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. I woke up this morning around 05:00 AM and the temperature was at -8F. It seems like it will go up a few degrees during the day until it starts dropping down in the mid afternoon. On Sunday we should we waking up to a balmy -20F. My wife and I did our grocery shopping for the week yesterday evening. We are not planning on leaving home this weekend.

Earlier today I read Cybersecurity: Is it Worse than We Think? authored by Chris Maurer, Kevin Kim, Dan J Kim, and Leon Allan Kappelman in the latest Communications of the ACM magazine. The article is interesting, but there was a sentence that called my attention the most. The sentence follows:

“While they [organizations] may be saying the right things in public to satisfy investors, underwriters, and customers, there is an apparent lack of urgency in promoting a truly resilient and secure organization”.

You need to read the article to fully understand the meaning. In my opinion addressing cyber threats requires an investment which has no obvious ROI. Given that the word on the street is that it is not if but when a company will be hacked, then by doing as little as possible and carrying insurance to cover the cost of a breach seems the best approach. Of course if you ask a customer whose PID has been published in the dark web, the sentiments might be quite different. Continue reading “Binary Tree Maximum Path”

Bigger is Greater

I was going to have a different introduction (the regular chit chat) to this post, but based on the article “Malevolent Machine Learning” by Chris Edwards on Communications of the ACM 12/2019 Volume 62 Number 12 I changed my mind. Allow me to explain.

A couple years ago I took a few courses from Coursera. The general topic was big data and machine learning. The course of interest is “Neural Networks and Deep Learning” by Andrew Ng deeplearning.ai. It was very interesting class and I highly recommend it.

I tried locating my notes on those courses, but not sure what I did with them. Found my notes. I hoped to have stored the transcriptions to verify what I recall about a specific class. I do not have the transcriptions Continue reading “Bigger is Greater”

Threads – Part I

Because I am an ACM member, earlier today I received a routine email message titled “ACM TechNews, Friday, March 24, 2017”. Most (if not all) articles are typically interesting. This time it was no exception. Sequential Programming Considered Harmful? from IEEE Spectrum by Russ Miller called my attention. If you have not read it yet, please take the time and you will understand my motivation to write this post which will be a part of a short sequence on the subject of threads. Continue reading “Threads – Part I”