We talked to the graduates of the Speech Information Systems MA program at ITMO about the ways our university helped jumpstart their careers. [More stories from our startups]:

• ITMO University startup accelerator introduces Laeneco, a smart stethoscope
• Quantum communications: building 100% secure data transfer systems

What is a Transaction?

The standard definition of Transaction state that “Every Query batch that runs in a SQL server is a Transaction.”, this means any query you run on a SQL server will be considered as a Transaction it could either be a simple SELECT query or any UPDATE or ALTER query.

If you run a query without mentioning the BEGIN TRAN keyword then it would be considered as an Implicit transition.

If you run a query which starts with BEGIN TRAN and ends with COMMIT or ROLLBACK then it would be considered as Explicit Transaction.

What is this article about?

In this article, I will tell about my participation in the first (out of two so far) Telegram blockchain contest. I didn't win any prize. However, decided to combine and share the unique experience I have had from the start to finish line, so my observations could help anyone who is interested.

Since I didn't want to write some abstract code, instead make something useful. I created instant lottery smart-contract and website which shows smart-contract data directly from Telegram Open Network (TON) avoiding any middle storage layers.

The article will be particularly useful for those, who want to write their first smart-contract for TON but don't know where to start.

Using the lottery as an example, I will go from setting up the environment to publishing a smart contract, interacting with it. Moreover, I will create a website that will show smart-contract data.

A surprising number of programming languages were created to accomplish unusual tasks that have nothing to do with programming. These are commonly called esoteric. Today, we’re going to paint a general overview of the esolang landscape, and try to figure out why people are continuing to create them.

Last time we got acquainted with the structure of an important component of the shared memory — the buffer cache. A risk of losing information from RAM is the main reason why we need techniques to recover data after failure. Now we will discuss these techniques.

The log

Sadly, there's no such thing as miracles: to survive the loss of information in RAM, everything needed must be duly saved to disk (or other nonvolatile media).

Therefore, the following was done. Along with changing data, the log of these changes is maintained. When we change something on a page in the buffer cache, we create a record of this change in the log. The record contains the minimum information sufficient to redo the change if the need arises.

For this to work, the log record must obligatory get to disk before the changed page gets there. And this explains the name: write-ahead log (WAL).

In case of failure, the data on disk appear to be inconsistent: some pages were written earlier, and others later. But WAL remains, which we can read and redo the operations that were performed before the failure but their result was late to reach the disk.

Almost four years have passed since the PVS-Studio team checked the OpenToonz source code. This project is a very powerful tool for creating two-dimensional animation. Since the last check, with its help, such animated works as Mary and the Witch Flower, Batman-Ninja, Promare and others were created. As large studios continue using Toonz, why not check the quality of the source code again?

Instruments for Apple's Xcode is a tool for performance analysis of an iOS application. In 2018 Apple introduced Custom Instruments — an opportunity to expand the standard set of instruments for application profiling. When existing tools are not enough, you can create new ones yourself — it will collect, analyze and display the data the way you need.

JavaScript, CSS, and HTML are some of the main technologies that help you to build robust app solutions. So, if you are looking to build smart web applications for your business, then I advise you to jump to my idea of cross-platform and open-source development frameworks right away.

Here is the list of the tech stacks for app developers to use in 2020.

Quantum Communications LLC creates some hacker-proof quantum encryption systems.

Let’s take a look at how they do it, and why their work matters.

What do you imagine when you hear the word "Queue"? If you are not familiar with Programming you maybe think about the queue in shop or hospital. But if you are a programmer you associate it 99% with Data Structures and Algorithms. Whoever you are, today we will discuss how to implement Queue Data Structure in JavaScript and what are its differences with a simple Array. Let's get started!

SecurityTube Linux Assembly Exam (SLAE) — is a final part of course:
securitytube-training.com/online-courses/securitytube-linux-assembly-expert
This course focuses on teaching the basics of 32-bit assembly language for the Intel Architecture (IA-32) family of processors on the Linux platform and applying it to Infosec and can be useful for security engineers, penetrations testers and everyone who wants to understand how to write simple shellcodes.
This blog post have been created for completing requirements of the Security Tube Linux Assembly Expert certification.
Exam consists of 7 tasks:
1. TCP Bind Shell
2. Reverse TCP Shell
3. Egghunter
4. Custom encoder
5. Analysis of 3 msfvenom generated shellcodes with GDB/ndisasm/libemu
6. Modifying 3 shellcodes from shell-storm
7. Creating custom encryptor

Alright, so you have just planned to hire developers for a Mobile App which could potentially steer your business ahead. The reasons for your decision would be quite obvious on the surface. Mobile App development is a core part of today’s businesses. It provides a near-perfect platform to serve customers through the portable devices they own.

But it’s easy to be a sheep! If you really try to understand this market, you’ll realize that more than half of the apps fail to earn revenue, and a significant amount of them barely cross 1,000 downloads. As per a Gartner report, it was found that barely 0.01 percent apps will find financial success by the year 2018.

New MS Edge is a promising Chrome flavour since Microsoft is really concerned with laptop battery life: most tests and benchmarks run against the «stock» browser in «stock» configuration. However, until recently it was hard for me to switch completely due to no «offline» support for Google office suite: doc, spreadsheet and slides. Fortunately, with the recent introduction of chrome extensions support it's now possible to put them offline with a few tricks!

GoROBO is an ITMO University project through and through: one of the co-owners graduated our mechatronics MA program, and two other employees are current postgrad students.

Let’s talk about the educational environment they want to create, why they chose to build such an unusual startup, and what awaits GoROBO clubs in the future.

Evolution and development have always been the integral parts of every sector you come across. Same is the case with programming languages. Numerous up gradations and invention of entirely new languages have divided the world of programming into legacy and modern. But no matter what, legacy programming still makes the foundation of many software, web applications and AI based techniques.

The new Windows Terminal version has been recently released. Everything would be fine, but performance of its scrollbar leaves a great deal to be desired. Time has come to poke it and have some mumbo jumbo dances with it.

Looking to build a new app, develop and test, or run small production workloads with Azure Cosmos DB? Our new Free Tier makes it easy to get started with no cost and save money as you build and grow new apps.



With Azure Cosmos DB Free Tier enabled, you’ll get the first 400 RU/s throughput and 5 GB storage in your account for free each month, for the lifetime of the account. That means that you can start small and grow with confidence, knowing your app will be running on a high-performance database service. You’ll only pay if your account exceeds 400 RU/s and 5 GB. Additionally, if your app has a lot of containers you can create up to 25 containers in a shared throughput database and have them all share the free 400 RU/s. You can have up to one free tier Azure Cosmos DB account per Azure subscription.

We’re happy to announce today the release of the C++ Build Insights SDK, a framework that gives you access to MSVC build time information via C and C++ APIs. To accompany this release, we are making vcperf open source on GitHub. Because vcperf itself is built with the SDK, you can use it as a reference when developing your own tools. We’re excited to see what sort of applications you’ll be building with the SDK, and we’re looking forward to receiving your feedback!

From speaking to desktop developers, we’ve heard that you want to learn how to quickly set up continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) workflows for your WPF and Windows Forms applications in order to take advantage of the many benefits CI/CD pipelines have to offer, such as:

• Catch bugs early in the development cycle
• Improve software quality and reliability
• Ensure consistent quality of builds
• Deploy new features quickly and safely, improving release cadence
• Fix issues quickly in production by rolling forward new deployments

That’s why we created a sample application in GitHub to showcase DevOps for your applications using the recently released GitHub Actions.

Today, Microsoft and partners across 35 countries took coordinated legal and technical steps to disrupt one of the world’s most prolific botnets, called Necurs, which has infected more than nine million computers globally. This disruption is the result of eight years of tracking and planning and will help ensure the criminals behind this network are no longer able to use key elements of its infrastructure to execute cyberattacks.

A botnet is a network of computers that a cybercriminal has infected with malicious software, or malware. Once infected, criminals can control those computers remotely and use them to commit crimes. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit, BitSight and others in the security community first observed the Necurs botnet in 2012 and have seen it distribute several forms of malware, including the GameOver Zeus banking trojan.