Coursera, Udacity, MIT Open Courseware, and other such sites are useful to me because they decouple the desire to learn college-level material from the expense and regulations of earning (another) diploma. The latter isn't compelling to me today, but the former certainly is. I've now taken three Coursera courses: Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Social Network Analysis, and Coding the Matrix: Linear Algebra Through Computer Science Applications. I also tried to take Calculus: Singl...

I wrote a 15*15, NYT-style crossword puzzle for Strange Loop. On the NYT difficulty scale, it's roughly a Wednesday-level puzzle. However, it was written for Strange Loop and thus does presume familiarity with functional programming and math, and has a few "inside jokes." You can find the puzzle and the solution on the Strange Loop wiki....

Today I have been presenting "FireMonkey 3D Programming" session on the SDE event in Zeist in the Netherlands. Bob Swart was so kind and invited me to present on the first session of the day in the "Delphi" conference track and I wanted to prepare a brand new demo to show off the power of FireMonkey. There is more and more FireMonkey resources available online, including new "FireMonkey blog", FireMonkey Info page, FireMonkey quickstart tutorials and many more. Some of the best FireMonkey cod...

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote What Is Homomorphic Encryption, and Why Should I Care? In that post, I promised to share my C# implementation of the algorithm from Craig Gentry's CACM article. Before I can do that, though, I need to explain some of the math involved. Perhaps surprisingly, it's actually very simple. (I say "surprisingly" because much of the math and technical papers on encryption is decidedly not simple, including that of Gentry's first fully homomorphic scheme, which was based...

Jeff Atwood says: On the other hand, I have not found in practice that programmers need to be mathematically inclined to become great software developers. Quite the opposite, in fact. This does depend heavily on what kind of code you're writing, but the vast bulk of code that I've seen consists mostly of the "balancing your checkbook" sort of math, nothing remotely like what you'd find in the average college calculus textbook, even. { i = j++ / (x + v); } Not exactly the stuff mathletes ...