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Join the European APPCUP 2013!

Take the chance to develop your application for Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8.

It??s a great opportunity to showcase your development skills for innovative applications.

While I???m strongly in the camp of ???everyone should use Twitter because we all use it in a different way,??? this humorous Twitter flowchart was just too interesting to not post. It???s basically a visualization that helps you critically think about why you should or shouldn???t use Twitter.

Christmas comes but once a year, which is similar to the frequency in which I blog.  I thought as it???s the season of good will, I would write a blog that details some of the free stuff we have to offer.  

Anyone who ever monitored or analyzed an application uses or has used averages. They are simple to understand and calculate. We tend to ignore just how wrong the picture is that averages paint of the world. To emphasis the point let me give you a real-world example outside of the performance space that I read recently in a newspaper.

The article was explaining that the average salary in a certain region in Europe was 1900 Euro’s (to be clear this would be quite good in that region!). However when looking closer they found out that the majority, namely 9 out of 10 people, only earned around 1000 Euros and one would earn 10.000 (I over simplified this of course, but you get the idea). If you do the math you will see that the average of this is indeed 1900, but we can all agree that this does not represent the “average” salary as we would use the word in day to day live. So now let’s apply this thinking to application performance.

Have you ever thought that computer science should include more dragons and wizards? Computational Fairy Tales introduces principles of computational thinking, illustrating high-level computer science concepts, the motivation behind them, and their application in a non-computer???fairy tale???domain. It???s a quest that will take you from learning the basics of programming in a blacksmith???s forge to fighting curses with recursion.

 Fifteen seers delivered the same prophecy, without so much as a single minstrel to lighten the mood: an unknown darkness threatens the kingdom. Suddenly, Princess Ann finds herself sent forth alone to save the kingdom. Leaving behind her home, family, and pet turtle Fido, Princess Ann must face goblin attacks, magical curses, arrogant scholars, an unpleasant oracle, and rude Boolean waiters. Along the way she must build a war chest of computational knowledge to survive the coming challenge.

The Computational Fairy Tales book includes ~30 rewritten or revised stories from the online collection and 15 all new chapters.  Each story serves to illustrate a computational concept, supplementing official instruction or motivating computer science concepts.  The stories have also be set up to provide a natural progression both within the computer science concepts and within the fairy tale quest.