KUKURUKU HUB

SMS Gateway API: start sending and receiving text messages

Written by TextMagic

TextMagic SMS API is a platform for building your own messaging app using our messaging infrastructure. It allows you to send and receive SMS text messages, query information about inbound and outbound messages, manage contacts, create templates (i.e. message formats and static texts) and schedule recurrent SMS messages as well as process bulk SMS messages. We have created a set of client libraries for the most popular programming languages (such as REST API Java and REST API PHP). These libraries allow you to integrate our API into your code in minutes. Just choose your preferred language to get started.

Celebrating 30th Anniversary of The First C++ Compiler: Let's Find Bugs in It

Written by Marina Makarova

This article was originally published at viva64.com . Republished by the authors' permission. Cfront is a C++ compiler which came into existence in 1983 and was developed by Bjarne Stroustrup. At that time it was known as «C with Classes». Cfront had a complete parser, symbol tables, and built a tree for each class, function, etc. Cfront was based on CPre. Cfront defined the language until circa 1990. Many of the obscure corner cases in C++ are related to the Cfront implementation limitations. The reason is that Cfront performed translation from C++ to C. In short, Cfront is a sacred artifact for a C++ programmer. So I just couldn't help checking such a project.  Introduction  The idea to check Cfront occurred to me after reading an article, devoted to the 30-th anniversary of the first Release version of this compiler: " 30 YEARS OF C++ ". I contacted Bjarne

Competing With Amazon: How to Improve Your Car Parts Store

Written by Alexander Lashkov

Going online allows you to significantly expand your customer base and auto parts stores are not an exception. There are multiple ways to buy a car, parts or potential substitutes and it’s really challenging to compete with giants like Amazon or eBay. Here’s our take on what can be possibly done in order to make your car parts store more efficient. The problem: Car parts search There is an average of 14,000 parts in a car (and it may go up to 30k) so it’s a quite a problem to look up some parts for your particular car brand and model. Offline stores usually have around 5k parts in inventory and people tend to flock to marketplaces, especially online aggregators like Amazon, that provide more options with detailed descriptions. Looking it up all by yourself is even more challenging as you have to dig into catalogs, VINs and diagrams

Top 10 FinTech Startups

Written by Jane

Financial technology or simply Fintech is one of the prominent lines of business nowadays. Fintech projects mostly focus on providing software infrastructure for finance-related activities. There is a great number of new innovative projects that we all can benefit from and Fintech projects help those initiatives with finance-related issues. Today we would like to present top 10 Fintech Startups that deserver your attention. 1. SDK.Finance It is probably the most innovative and versatile Fintech company on this list. It is the back-end software for the quickest technological start of any FinTech products. The company has recently won the best Fintech startup of 2015 award hosted by Central European Startup Awards. Loyalty programs, Gift cards, E-wallets, Payment systems, Billing systems, Bitcoin based services, Mobile payments, P2P money transfer, Lending platforms and other finance products can be built with SDK.finance back-end software in the shortest terms. Companies usually spend about a

Go Learn Golang! Introduction for Beginners

Written by andrew

Hi, my name is Andrey Grehov and welcome to “Learn Go Programming Language From Scratch”. This series of articles is going to be a short course to get you comfortable programming Go. Go, also commonly referred to as golang , is a programming language developed at Google. It is a statically-typed language with syntax loosely derived from that of C. However, it is a new language across the board. In every respect the language was designed by thinking about what programmers do and how to make programming, at least the kind of programming we do, more effective, which means more fun. We’re going to go through all of the core features, focusing first on regular syntax, the essential task of creating variables and functions, basic program flow, and how these things are different here. Go rethinks the traditional Object Oriented development you might be used to while still providing

3 ways to boost your offline business with APIs

Written by Alexander Lashkov

New tech empowers companies as they try to build better products and services. APIs (Application programming interfaces) provide multiple ways to do it with ease and utilise third-party solutions – out of the box tools that save you time on development. Though APIs is definitely not a new thing for online business (most of services have some kind of application programming interfaces – Mailchimp , Litmus ), offline still lacks understanding of possible ways to improve business efficacy with such a convenient tool. We decided to deal with this issue and explain it in plain words. Car parts search Going online allows you to significantly expand your customer base and auto parts stores are not an exception. Web provides new opportunities as well as some challenges that affect the outcome. Any store cares about its budget and tries to come up with cost-effective ways to manage its inventory. Most

How to take screenshots correctly: some practical tips

Written by Kirill Kliushkin

If you have ever made a help file or user manual for your app, you’re sure to have noticed the unexpected amount of time and effort producing screenshots takes. You’d think a screenshot was “a second’s work, Alt+PrintScreen and Ctrl+V!”. Some clients are surprised to hear that a screenshot in a user manual can cost $2 or even $5. In this article, I’ll advise you on how to take screenshots correctly, why they’re not just “two clicks” and what pitfalls an inexperienced screenshotter may meet. See it as a checklist or a list of practical tips for those who write software documentation. I hope it will help you avoid disappointments, and delight your users with beautiful, easy-to-understand images. What Needs a Screenshot? Needs a screenshot: Layout of the main elements and areas of the interface with captions. For example, the toolbar, status bar, main menu, pop-up menu. This avoids

Introduction to J Programming Language [2004]

Written by Dr. K. L. Metlov

Take a look at the brief introduction to the J programming language . It took me two days to write the article. I got familiar with this language a little more than a month ago, when looking for a convenient way for programming on the Pocket PC. All this month, I read books and articles about J, K and APL. I also tried out programs of other developers, wrote some trivial ones of my own and recently wrote my first, non-trivial program, which I improved and described in this article. My overall impression of J programming language is admiration. You’re welcome to read my article and share your thoughts about any mistakes or ambiguities found in it. Introduction Evolutionary Branches In these days of universal computer literacy, it’s difficult to find an active person, who has no idea of programming languages that allow to control the computer. But even

DBX To PST Converter for Windows – Import OE to MS Outlook

Written by Stephan Ronald

DBX to PST conversion is the best technique to migrate emails from Outlook express to Microsoft Outlook 2013, 2010, 2007 and 2003 etc. In this article I will explain a safe and suitable method to perform the conversion. Outlook Express being an outdated email application is not used amongst users but those who are using wanted to migrate to MS Outlook to avail advance set of features and compatibility. Users who are seeking migration from OE to Microsoft Outlook needs to first convert DBX items in PST file importable in MS Outlook. This is because MS Outlook does not understand DBX format to read files, users are required to convert DBX in PST to allow Outlook reads its mailbox items. For such concerns only third party tools like DBX to PST converter are used as there is no manual procedure available to import Outlook Express in MS Outlook. How

Lock-Free Data Structures. Exploring Queues

Written by Max Khiszinsky

It was long ago since the last time we talked about lock free containers. I was planning to quickly write another article about queues, but there was one problem. I knew what I wanted to write about, but I had no implementation of those methods in C++. It was wrong to write about something I did not try out myself. That’s how I tried to implement new queue algorithms in libcds . So now I can continue the series. This article is going to be the last one in the series about queues. Last time we spoke about them, we considered some interesting algorithms of lock free queues and provided their operation results in some synthetic tests. To sum up, it was really bad. Our hopes that the lock free approach on the magic compare-and-swap (CAS) would give us at least any, if not linear, performance gain with the

Short Story on Scaling an NLP Problem without Using a Ton of Hardware

Written by eandrawos

The cornerstone of the small work done for getting the info for these great charts with IEPY , was to be able to catch mentioned companies. The basic idea of relation extraction is to be able to detect mentioned things in text (so called Mentions, or Entity-Occurrences), and later decide if in the text is expressed or not the target relation between each couple of those things. In our case, we needed to find where companies were mentioned, and later determine if in a given sentence it was said that Company-A was funding Company-B or not. In order to detect those funding we needed to be sure of capturing every mention of a company. And although the NER used catched most of them, there are always some folks that name their company #waywire or 8th Story, words that are not very easily trackable with a NER. A good solution

Everything You Wanted to Know about USB Type-C, but did not Ask

Written by MVideo

Dear %username%, Have you heard of the new USB Type-C? The one double-sided, fast and fancy. It can charge the new MacBook and promises to become a new standard for the next ten years? So, first of all, it is a type of connector, and not a new standard. The standard is called USB 3.1. Secondly, we should talk about the new standard of USB, while Type-C is a nice bonus. Let’s find out the difference and what things are behind USB 3.1 and Type C. We will also learn how to charge a laptop with a USB-cable and see what else can be done with the new USB Type-C. Fast Facts As a standard, USB appeared almost twenty years ago. The first specifications for the USB 1.0 appeared in 1994 and solved three key problems: unification of a connector, simplicity for users, high speed data transfer to and

Unfunny April Fool's Joke from the Magic Lantern Developers

Written by Vladimir Ivanov

Magic Lantern (ML) is an unofficial firmware for Canon cameras that provides enhanced functionality (like dual-iso, focus stacking, raw video, camera parameters fine-tuning and a lot more). The firmware is installed directly on the flash card, which allows to remove it without serious consequences, or update it by simply replacing files. You might have read other articles related to this firmware, so I’m not going to dwell on its features and the order of installation. What I will tell you about is how the firmware developers tricked me with an unfunny April fool’s joke. All the described actions have been performed using the Canon 650D camera with the stock (1.01) firmware. March 28th . It all started when the hunger for learning something new had reached the critical point and I found out how to perform automatic focus stacking on my camera. But this feature required installation of the

The Sunset of C and C++

Written by biicode

Because not only CPU cycles count, but also developers’ time There are approximately 4 million C and C++ programmers in the world, probably the largest community, with about 20% of the market, which is comparable or even larger than Java (both C and C++ together). They are also by far the oldest languages of the current mainstream ones, used in key industries and even increasingly due to synergies with other fields as the IoT/embedded systems or robotics, in which these languages are important. C++ is a great language, and it is improving faster than ever with the recent 11 and 14 standards, and 17 is very promising too. It is amazing how the syntax is becoming closer and closer to other more “modern” languages as python. And C is the solid foundation of most current IT technology. State of the art compilers, optimizers, debuggers and IDEs for C and

Exact Maximum Clique for Large or Massive Real Graphs

Written by biicode

The excellent performance reported by BBMCSP—an exact maximum clique algorithm tailored for massive real networks— in a previous post has raised a number of comments, some even questioning either the report itself or the problem’s complexity. This post gives an insight on how BBMCSP works. In the process, and similar to what happens when magicians explain their tricks, we are aware that some of the magic will be lost. BBMCSP’s overarching ideas are described in the pseudocode below: BBMCSP: an exact maximum clique algorithm Input: A simple graph G(V, E) Output: A maximum clique in G in Smax Compute k-core decomposition of G: K(G) Compute an initial clique greedily: Smax Remove vertices from G such that K(v)<|Smax|: Gr (Vr, Er) Sort Vr according to degeneracy Iteratively branch on vertices in Vr in reverse order: v | Compute subproblem derived from v: W ⊆ Vr | Compute a greedy coloring

Integrating Email with Team Chat

Written by Alexander Lashkov

Most team chat services have some type of email support. Pretty much all provide one-way notifications for missed messages, others go a step further and let you reply to them —with attachments, even [ Fleep , Glip , Kato ]— but none take it all the way back to days of Outlook and BlackBerry, circa 2004. Back then, people sent hundreds of short, chat-like emails per day to just a handful of recipients—usually very close colleagues. BlackBerry was the way to keep the conversation going when on the go. Who am I fooling? Many people—the Alaska-sized area under the adoption bell curve representing the tried-and-true crowd—still use email this way in 2015. And that's OK! Because Sameroom Email Adapter The good news is you can spare them the pain of dealing with whatever you kids are using these days and create a real-time integration between your chatrooms and their

Top 5 Anonymous E-mail Providers

Written by Info_sec

In the recent years we hear more and more about on-line security and privacy. People wonder how to be anonymous on the web, securely chat with friends (or business partners) with assurance there's no third party reading their conversations or send e-mail/share a file which cannot be tapped/intercepted. Concerns are being aired frequently within on-line communities and reported by the mass media. There are a lot of services which only give you the ability to use temporary e-mail (when you do not want to register somewhere with your real e-mail) but do not provide any encryption or secure connection when it comes to anonymity and people would often confuse one with the other. That is why we explicitly searched for secure e-mail providers and today we give our top 5. 1. Hushmail Our first stop is the service that will attract orthodox users (who do not like fancy interface

Tor: Illegal Weapons

Written by uuii

A few years ago, when I was reading some popular weapons forum, I thought of how much a gun might cost at the black market. Actually, I wasn’t going to buy one, as I had an arsenal of legal weapons of my own. I was just curious about it. Let’s see what discoveries I made. One of the samples Disclaimer : Further description is not an instruction of how and where to buy or sell illegal weapons (therefore, i'll will not provide any links). It’s just a research of quite a relevant topic with some summary at the end. After some time googling the Internet, it seemed that all the weapons offered there looked suspicious. Neither the websites, nor the sellers inspired confidence. But I kept looking anyway. One day, I came across an anonymous network called Tor , which is also called the “deep” or the “dark” Internet.

How to Share a Channel Between Slack Teams

Written by Alexander Lashkov

Odds are you’re in love with Slack. This new tool is a fantastic way to keep your team on the same page—and cut back on email. Unfortunately, Slack has a limitation: it doesn’t easily connect disparate (e.g. external and intra-company) teams. For example, in an agency, your team can use Slack to reduce call volume and expedite communication. But, what if the clients you work with have their own Slack, and don’t want to create new accounts? We’ve talked to a number of folks who find such situations a real bother. Admittedly, this is a notable shortcoming in an otherwise great platform. There are, however, a handful of ways to solve this problem. Curious? Read on: Option 1: Create a New Slack Team The most common way to bridge the gap between two teams is to create a new Slack team. This seems like a low-friction solution, and in

Client Communication is Killing Your Agency (And How to Fix This)

Written by Alexander Lashkov

Many are drawn to the idea of running a creative agency: interesting projects; great creative minds; and, of course, ideas people take notice of. Nevertheless, the challenges of agency life can prove a rude awakening, for the new agency operator. Keeping your agency profitable relies on many variables. You need even cashflow, dependable processes, and a little bit of luck. That said, the lifeblood of any creative company is communication. That’s what I’m going to cover today: how client communication impacts the bottom line—and the quality of life for all involved. (Oh, yeah, and I’m pitching my product, too—because someday it’ll save your ass.) Slo-mo to Crunch Mode As you probably already know, the underlying challenge for any agency lies in establishing a healthy balance. This requires you to juggle a number of ongoing projects and delivery times, while maintaining work quality. You’ll need to do this while managing

Structure of the Data Center of TIER 3 Level

Written by Beeline (resilience)

Beeline , earlier Bee Line GSM is a Russian telecommunications brand by OJSC VimpelCom. OJSC VimpelCom is a Russia's third-largest wireless and second-largest telecommunications operator. Its headquarters is located in Moscow. Since 2009, OJSC VimpelCom has been a subsidiary of VimpelCom Ltd., which is based in Amsterdam. VimpelCom's main competitors in Russia are Mobile TeleSystems and MegaFon. There used to be a field in place of the data center. We dug a huge 100 meter foundation pit. Then, the data center looked like a concrete pad. Using metal constructions, we have built a hexagonal building, which houses six modules of the data center (they’re highlighted in green), the command center to monitor the backbone network across the country, and the office. Warning! A lot of traffic and geekporn : 91 images of the newly launched first module. There are still some works being maintained there, but no more major

Do Not Learn Frameworks. Learn the Architecture.

Written by Alex Rboots

I had an interesting conversation some time ago. A colleague of mine stood up for Angular and said that it fastened web development. I’ve developed complex web services for more than 10 years, used to work for Microsoft, and also Spotware Systems in Cyprus. As for now, I create an application for a strartup from the Silicon Valley. All in all, I follow the trends. But I felt like a dinosaur, as I saw no sense in using frontend frameworks, and it turned out to be mainstream. It was 2014, and I plunged into the world of Angular, Knockout and Backbone. If you want to find out what came out of it and why I stopped using them and recommend you to do the same, welcome under the cut. We all know that Angular has a lot of problems, and debugging is one of the main ones. When undocumented

A Game in 14 Days

Written by Allex

NB: English is my second language. There is Russian language in videos and screenshots. There are a lot of “teams” that have existed for years. Their list of developers consists of dozens of people, plus, “everyone needed!”. But they don't have any adequate demo planned even for the nearest future. Looking at all of this, I feel like saying: “What are you doing, damn it?”. But it’s destructive. It’s not enough to criticize. I should provide positive examples. These considerations led me to an interesting experiment. I came across a flight simulator competition. It involved two months of development, but I thought that it was too much. That’s why I decided to take part in it. And… Forgot about the competition for a month and a half. The basic idea of the experiment is to develop a complete project within two weeks. The completion date of the competition is

PVS-Studio for Visual C++

Written by Andrey Karpov

Many of our articles are concentrated on anything but the PVS-Studio analyzer itself. We tell our readers about projects we have checked, nuances of C++ language, creation of plugins in C#, running PVS-Studio from the command line… But PVS-Studio was first of all designed for Visual Studio users. We have done a lot to make their work with the tool as comfortable as possible. But this particular fact is very often left outside the frame. I've decided to improve the situation and tell you about the PVS-Studio plugin from scratch. If you work in Visual C++, this article is for you. What Static Code Analysis Is and Why Do We Need It Static code analysis is the process of detecting errors and defects in software's source code. Static code analysis can be treated as an automated code review process. Code review is a wonderful technique but it has one

Julia Set

Written by Pavel Nesterov

I always wanted to learn more about complex numbers. Not just the fact that the root of -1 was equal to i . I was particularly interested in figures with fractal structure. I wanted to understand what this meant and how to make such visualization. Having some time from work, I found a book on the theory of functions of a complex variable on the shelf and decided that it was time to start. Iterated Function Before writing an algorithm, we’ll have to learn a few basic notions. We’ll start with the concept of the iteration of function f . Let’s introduce the following notion of the n -th iteration of function f : in which ○ is a function composition . We’ll take the following identity map as the zero iteration: There are plenty of fixed-point theorems of certain types of maps. Let’s recall what a fixed point

Social Network Analysis. Spark GraphX

Written by Alex Krot

Today we will learn more about the tasks of social network analysis ( SNA ), and review the Apache Spark library designed to analyze Big Data. We will also consider one of the components of Apache Spark, designed for the analysis of graphs — GraphX . We’ll try to understand how this library has implemented the distributed graph storage and computations on them. The provided examples will show how we can use this library in practice. For instance, to search for the spam, rank search results, determine communities in social networks, or search for opinion leaders, and it’s not a complete list of applying methods for analyzing graphs. Let’s start with recalling the main objects we’ll work with in the given article. Graph Theory, Random Graphs and Webgraphs  A graph is an ordered pair G = (V,E) , in which V is a set of vertices (say, websites on

The Night of Fractals

Written by Matvey Kotov

It was a late Sunday night, and I was thinking to go to sleep, when a friend of mine sent me a picture from some website and wrote: “Beautiful!”. I drew such pictures five years ago by using the so-called escape-time algorithm. But to apply this algorithm, it was necessary to know how to partition the plane into regions for a given set of transformations. I couldn't figure it out, and did not get back to this algorithm anymore. But now I knew exactly what should I do and wrote him back: “Random IFS first, then kNN, and then the Escape-Time Algorithm!” I had an old netbook at hand, as my laptop was under repair. My friend was saying something to me, and I was answering him, but in my mind I was already writing code, and was searching for at least some compiler on the netbook. And I

Lock-Free Data Structures. Yet Another Treatise

Written by Max Khiszinsky

As you might have guessed, this article focuses on lock-free queues. Queues can be different. They can differ in the number of producers and consumers (single/multi producer — single/multi consumer, 4 variants). They can be bounded, on the basis of a pre-allocated buffer, and unbounded, on the basis of a list. They can either support priorities, or not. They can be lock-free, wait-free or lock-based, with the strict (fair) and not strict (unfair) conformance to FIFO, etc. These types of queues are described in detail in the article by Dmitry Vyukov . As a rule, the more specialized requirements to a queue are, the more efficient its algorithm is. In this article, we will consider the most common version of queues – multi-producer/multi-consumer unbounded concurrent queues without the support of priorities. I guess the queue is the favorite data structure for researchers. On the one hand, it’s really simple;

A MIDI Player on Eight Floppy Drives

Written by Vlad_RT

Some times ago, I watched a video about singing floppy drives and a heap of written off computers, and decided to make something of the kind. Make it on Arduino like the rest? Seriously? As they say, f*ck the system! I decided to make it on Atmega8A , as that’s what I had at hand. I also decided that wires were unnecessary, and found HC-05. Let’s go! The Circuit As usual, the first stage is the circuit. No problem with that. It is simple, without unnecessary bells and whistles. The Board It was no problem to make it with the help of the photoresist. Scattered everything in 1o minutes and produced it in an hour. The Code Now, the fun part begins — programming. To save some time, I decided to write in C. But I made the same mistake at the very beginning. It was about controlling floppy

Real-time notifications on Django using gevent-socketio and RabbitMQ

Written by eandrawos

This time we’ll be replacing Node.js with a 100% Python implementation using gevent-socketio and Redis with RabbitMQ, but we also didn’t want to bore you with the same vanilla notifications site, so we’re going to build something different. Something useful. This time we’re going to build a complete GeoDjango-based site to report geo-located incidents in real-time using Google Maps. The Application The application is a Django 1.7 site that uses GeoDjango (backed by PostGIS) to track and report in real-time geo-located incidents that occur in certain areas of interest around the world. It provides views to manage incidents and areas of interest, a view to monitor the occurrence of incidents in real-time and a view to report incidents that uses geolocator to detect the user’s location. Whenever an incident is saved (or updated), a message is sent to a RabbitMQ broadcast queue. At this time, the system checks whether

Do Not Wake the Programmer Up!

Written by Alex Hunder

Hey there! I’m back from the first vacation in my life… and I guess that some people have not been on vacation in their entire life. I’m not sure that it’s useful to take a break from work for almost a month. I haven’t realized what effect it would have on productivity. But during the holidays, I understood something about things I’ve been thinking about for a while, but couldn’t realize them. I was always tormented by the following question. How to explain to people who have never done the kind of work I do, the idea of what happens in my head and heads of others like me when we work? How a NON programmer can imagine a programmer’s work and finally understand what happens there and what to do about it? I think I understand it now. Maybe because I’ve been out of this process for almost

How I built my first Android Game and realized creativity is all about iterations

Written by Afsar Ahmad

Last week, on 27th February 2015, I released my first android game Rocket Romeo. As I started to spread the message to my friends, the game built traction. The graphics, mechanics and experience of the game has been greatly appreciated so far. In the midst of appreciation, I found that most of the people recognized my attempt to be creative. I have been wondering what creativity really is because for the past 45 days all I have done is tried to build a game which is loved by masses. The process was full of experimentation and iterations. To elucidate my iteration cycle, I am sharing the story of building Rocket Romeo. Here’s how the game now looks. Like I have said, I have been appreciated to be really creative while building this game. But on the other hand in my opinion — I was not creative, but iterative. Why I started

USB Killer

Written by Dark Purple

It was a usual gloomy winter morning. My colleagues and I were drinking our morning coffee, sharing the news and there were no signs of trouble. But then a friend told about… (a quote from a chat in Skype): I read an article about how a dude in the subway fished out a USB flash drive from the outer pocket of some guy’s bag. The USB drive had “128” written on it. He came home, inserted it into his laptop and burnt half of it down. He wrote “129” on the USB drive and now has it in the outer pocket of his bag… A Picture to Attract Attention: Since I work in the company engaged in the development and manufacture of electronics, my colleagues and I are began to discuss options for creating a USB flash drive, that «would burn half a laptop down.» We had plenty of

Quantum Search Using Grover’s Algorithm

Written by Roman V. Dushkin

Following the first quantum algorithms we have already reviewed ( Deutsch’s algorithm and the Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm — it's better to read these articles first, otherwise all the things mentioned here will be quite vague), let’s analyze Grover’s algorithm for the unstructured quantum search. An American mathematician Lov Grover formulated the algorithm in 1996 (it was long after the model of quantum computations had become popular). The algorithm uses a feature of quantum interference in order to solve an extremely demanding task of searching the value of some parameter, at which a defined function returns certain results. The given algorithm does not show the exponential advantage of the task in contrast to the classical computational model, but the advantage (quadratic) is quite essential for big values. However, it’s a general algorithm for solving quite a generalized problem. It has been proved that we cannot get a better result within the