I’ve just installed Ubuntu version 9.10 (Karmic Koala) from scratch on my new work machine and noticed that you can no longer right click on a file to encrypt it. The functionality is still there – it just isn’t available by default. To get it just...

Almost every computer you buy these days contains more than one processor core – even my laptop has 2 – and I have access to relatively inexpensive desktops that have as many as 8.  So, it is hardly surprising that I am steadily receiving more and...

Will Robertson and I have released a new version of our colorbarplot package for Mathematica 6 and above.  Colorbarplot has only one aim and that is to allow Mathematica users to add a MATLAB-like colorbar to their graphs.  Something like this for...

Slowly but surely more and more MATLAB functions are becoming able to take advantage of multi-core processors.  For example, in MATLAB 2009b, functions such as sort, bsxfun, filter and erf (among others) gained the ability to spread the calculational...

Back in August 2008, Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood launched a question and answer site aimed squarely at programmers and it has been a massive hit.  Called Stack Overflow, the site currently contains over 330,000 questions and answers covering pretty...