Peter Norvig, Google’s Director of Research, wrote an article explaining how to write a spelling corrector. He wrote using python in 21 lines. After this, many people implemented in other languages, I wrote in C to compare the amount of lines and speed. I quote some of Norvig’s paragraphs below: “In the past week, two friends (Dean and Bill) independently told me they were amazed at how Google does spelling correction so well and quickly. Type in a search like [speling] and Google comes back in 0.1 seconds or so with Did you mean: spelling. (Yahoo and Microsoft are similar.)…

You work for a company that gives laptop to all employees, if you are not from the technology department, you’ll not have access to the administrator area, this normally means, among many other things, that you’ll have a fixed ip and you can’t change it. Let’s say your fixed ip is: 192.168.5.10 Now imagine that you need to travel on business and you’ll need to connect in many networks during the travel. The airport hotspot, the client you’ll visit and the hotel. Probably all networks you’ll visit will have a DHCP server, which would give you an available ip in…

Internet Explorer 6 had a local list of trusted certificate authorities, when accessing a secure website, it would check locally if the certificate is valid and return right away to the user. When Internet Explorer 7 was released, it came with a new idea, the list came empty and IE7 had to communicate with Microsoft datacenter to check it’s status. If it is valid, then it will show a green background in the URL prompt, if it’s not or it could not communicate with the datacenter, it will show a red background in the URL prompt and a warning page…