December 2012

An exceedingly common question asked in coding interviews is to write a function, method, algorithm, whatever to determine if a number is prime. Prime numbers have a wide range of applications in computer science, particularly with regard to cryptography. The idea is that factoring large numbers into their prime factors is extremely difficult. “Because both the system’s privacy and the security of digital money depend on encryption, a breakthrough in mathematics or computer science that defeats the cryptographic system could be a disaster. The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be the development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers.” -Bill Gates, The Road Ahead ...

“A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.” I’ve been developing my open source Android framework, Infinitum, for the better part of 10 months now. It has brought about some really interesting problems that I’ve had to tackle, which is one of the many reasons I enjoy working on it so much. Chicken or the Egg Although it’s much more now, Infinitum began as an object-relational mapper which was loosely modeled after Hibernate. One of the first major issues I faced while developing the ORM component was loading object graphs. To illustrate what I mean by this, suppose we’re developing some software for a department store. The domain model for this software might look something like this: ...