Author Archives: Giuseppe Barbalinardo

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March 1, 2016

Prototyping with Interface Builder

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With the acquisition of Next in 1997, a new tool was initiated into the Apple family. Originally known as an enhancement of OpenStep, called NextStep, it caught the attention of the developer community under the name of Interface Builder, as part of the XCode suite. Now about to celebrate its 20th birthday, Interface Builder represents the most powerful IDE to design user interfaces in a development suite. It doesn’t matter if you are writing an app for iOS, Cocoa, tvOS or watchOS; when carefully used, it will save you hundreds of lines of code. For this and other innumerable reasons, many developers, like myself, love this tool.

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posted

May 29, 2015

Parallel Computing with a GPU

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Graphic Processor Units are becoming more and more important in recent years and are spreading into many different fields, some of which include: computational finance, defense and intelligence, machine learning, fluid dynamics, structural mechanics, electronic biology, physics, chemistry, numerical analysis and security. There are many reasons why a person should learn how to write code for a GPU. For example, GPU’s have been used to successfully decrypt passwords (add reference) in record time, a 25-GPU cluster is able to crack any standard Windows password (95^8 combinations) in less than 6 hours. Other applications of the GPU include data mining for Bitcoin and also applying machine learning for sentimental analysis on tweets.

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posted

April 21, 2015

HOWTO: Status Check for a Website Database

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Many people know about services that allow you to ping your website to be sure it’s always online. The idea behind those is that they check every 5/10 mins sending a GET request to the given website and if they get an answer 200 they send you an email.

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posted

July 7, 2014

Who Will Win the World Cup? A Method to Predict the Future

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Several weeks ago I tried to predict who would win the World Cup. I faced this interesting problem I want to share: how can we relate the outcome of the World Cup with the strength of the teams? Let me explain it better: How can we account for the fact that some “lucky” teams play easier matches than others and thus most likely will arrive to a better stage?

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