I play chess occasionally but I don’t know what happened and made me remember this problem. The 8-Queens problem goes like this. You have an empty chessboard and you have to place eight queens on it in a way that no two queens can attack each other. This simply means that each row, column or diagonal has only one queen. It is a well known problem and it is used in Artificial Intelligence courses. The eight queens is the real example for the generalized problem, the n-queens on a nxn chessboard. There are solutions when n equals to 1 or be greater than 3. This problem is also known as the eight queens puzzle and it was proposed in 1848 by Max Bezzel.
Peter likes Galaxy Note
Peter is not a friend of mine, he is not even human, he is an elephant and a very smart one. He uses Galaxy Note to play musical instruments, draw things and take pictures. This is the second Galaxy Note commercial I post but I don’t do it for Samsung. I just found it very funny and if that was the purpose of the ad then they succeeded. I love to see strange gamers and this is not the first time we see one in this website, if you missed the Bearded Dragon playing games on a smart phone visit Strange Gamer and watch that too. The link was sent to me via email but YouTube says that it is from Mashable and I like giving credits. Enjoy the video and wait for the next strange gamer.
WPF – Styles – Change Image Source
I don’t post in this section often because I don’t know the most common problems unless I receive an email from someone about a problem. You can understand the need with the number of results after searching about a specific problem. Many programmers have this issue, they find difficulties when they try to change the source of the image using datatriggers. This is because they try to put only the change in the trigger. In order for this to work you should also include the source property in the style as a setter for the default image source instead of initializing it in your image. If you initialize the source in the image tag like this <Image Source=”/Resources/OK.png” /> it will not work.
Malware in your RAM
Anti-virus companies are doing a (very) good job at detecting malware in our computers but hackers are always one step ahead. Some users think that having an anti-malware software on their computers are safe and some others think that they don’t even need them because they are very carefull on what they download. For both categories, the reason they believe that is ignorance which is sometimes a bless but not in this case. Many malwares are injected to your system by a method called drive-by download or drive-by-installation. Malwares can be installed to your computer by just opening a malicious email or visiting a website. Recently security researches at Kaspersky lab discovered a malware that it does not even create any files on your hard drive and thus can not be found by (most of) anti-malware programs. It is injected in your RAM with the drive-by download method by exploiting a Java vulnerability and you are infected while your computer is not shutting down.
Google Earth Vulnerability
Another vulnerability found in one of Google products, this time in Google Earth. The vulnerability was found by Ucha Gobejishvili, also known as Longrifle0x. The vulnerability allows code execution and it applies on all Google Earth versions. You can try it yourself, download Google Earth, install it on your computer and open it. Click on Placemark, put there your code and execute it. You thought that it was going to be harder and need more low-level knowledge but that’s it. Lately security researchers have found several vulnerabilities on Google products and some of them were critical and this proves that Google products are not as safe as they made us believe, including its web browser Chrome.
Duqu’s secret programming language
Kaspersky experts were called to investigate Duqu and they discovered that its framework was written in a programming language they didn’t recognize. The mystery of the unknown programming language is solved. Duqu framework is (most likely) written in an custom object-oriented extension of the programming language C called “OO C”. That code it is compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio Compiler 2008 with some special options (“/O1″ and “/Ob1″) that optimizes the code size and the inline expansion. Despite the fact that it is a malicious software, the developers have done an excellent job and they make the life of security expert difficult.
Mutillidae – Penetrate and Hack
Mutillidae is a free and open source web application which can be used by security experts who want to use their penetration testing tools and hack a website. Mutillidae can be installed on any computer with a web server. You can easily install a web server on your personal computer by using XAMPP which installs a web server (Apache), a database (MySQL) and several other tools. Mutillidae has several vulnerabilities and hints which makes hacking very easy. It can be used by security experts who want to test their penetration testing applications, by students who learn about web application security and in general by any security enthusiast who wants to learn the vulnerabilities of a web application and how hackers exploit them to gain access. You can visit SourceForge website to see the full list of Mutillidae’s features and download it.
Siri – The Horror Movie trailer
You have heard a lot about Siri and how amazing is and how helpful. Some of you might even have an iPhone with Siri and talk to her every day. But what if Siri is not as friendly as you think she is. What if the next update change her and make her something scary, something… deadly? You should watch this trailer of the horror movie about Siri. After watching this video, you will change you mind about Siri and next time that it will ask for upgrade you will think again. I don’t want to scare you, watch the trailer and Beware the upgrade.
The evolution of the Moon
We all watch the Moon from time to time and most of us admire it. Moon is also approached as a must see in a romantic date and for some others a full moon means werewolves. If you look at it with a telescope you will notice its craters and general its formation. If you did so when you were a small kid and again recently you will notice that there is no change on what you see. This is true for the near past but Moon was not like this from the beginning. Thanks to NASA and its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter you can now see the evolution of the Moon and enjoy it in HD (up to 1080p). The video is very informative and very interesting to watch.
Google to start charging for its maps
Google used to offers most of its services for free to spread them and gain a large share and now starts to charging for them. They started with the translate API and now with Google maps. Google started changing a lot time ago and if they continue to put money first they will loose. They offered their services for free and that let millions of people to use them and contribute to make them better and now they decided to charge them for the information they gave. Without the contribution from the people it would take them a lot longer to gain the information they have. Now internet users will probably move to a free alternative such as OpenStreetMaps but there are more of them including Bing Maps and WikiMapia. Google might start charging for other APIs too in the near future but this will create a move from companies and users to start replacing Google with alternatives.