• IBM is holding a contest to see who can create the best solution for natural disaster relief.
• The winning team will get $200,000, support from IBM to make the prototype a reality, and introduction to venture capitalists.

IBM is asking developers to build a solution to disaster relief – and the company is providing an incentive to do it.

The company on Thursday at the VivaTech Conference in Paris announced Call for Code, a global initiative that calls on developers to create technology that can be used for natural disaster preparedness and relief.

The main component of the initiative is a contest, where the creators of a prototype – like an app that predicts when and where the disaster will be most severe – will win $200,000, support from IBM to make the prototype a reality, and introduction to venture capitalists.

IBM, which is working with the United Nations Human Rights Office and the American Red Cross, is pledging $30 million over five years to the program. The money will go toward developer tools, technologies, free code and training with experts. Developers can already access IBM resources about data and AI, blockchain, cloud and IoT technologies.

“At IBM, we harness the power of technologies like AI, blockchain, IoT and cloud to address some of the biggest opportunities and challenges in business,” Bob Lord, IBM chief digital officer, said in a statement. “Now, with Call for Code, we are calling on all developers to join us and use these same leading edge technologies to help people, their communities and society.”

IBM is an acknowledged leader in the use of blockchain for financial and enterprise reasons, and its Watson AI services are popular in certain areas like health care. So making these technologies available, along with the $30 million pledge, encourages coders to gain experience with IBM’s tech, while also serving a cause.

if you can’t do then teach!

In this post I’m going to explain how exactly to teach programming, and how to relate to people who know nothing about programming. Techniques in order to get the message through, strategies in order to be a longer lasting mentor and lastly the mindset required.

Real world explanations

It’s not enough to speak in mumbo jumbo such as polymorphism, multithreading, typescript, blah blah these words mean nothing to people who don’t know programming. Start from the very beginning. What do they know? They know real world. So when explaining something like for example a Superclass, you can use something like a vehiclebeing the Superclass and car truckbus train plane etc as the Subclasses. People can relate to this.

Patience and reward

Teaching requires patience. It’s crucial not to rush the process, however you must provide guidance at the right time. In some cases, people get annoyed or frustrated and just want to give up! This is the nature of problem-solving and programming as it requires persistence. The student will develop this over time. You can’t teach this through words, but you can elevate reward when a student gets a win.. by genuinely celebrating the win!

Another key reason why we must have patience as a teacher is because everyone learns at different paces. People learn in different ways. So if someone is not getting what you’re saying, try rephrasing your words and approach it like it’s a challenge on your end, not theirs.

Encouragement and positivity

You know what… you could be teaching a person who goes onto to create the next Facebook, Instagram, Trello, Slack, Microsoft, Linux, Mac, Google, and any other ball-busting Internet products/services. Don’t underestimate the power teaching and the power of influence. Offer encouragement to think bigger, to do bigger, to be bigger and reinforce it with positivity… you might just be the teacher of the next person who creates the cure for cancer.
Honestly you never know.

Share real stories

People get bored easy. A common question in teaching is – What is the point of all this? and actually it’s a really, really good question. Underlying this question is an applied value function to compute whether the student is wasting their time or not. So damn.. just give them an insight into the future. Share with them what it’s like to work as a developer, and what are the fruits of our labour. This instills motivation – very, very powerful tool.

Lead and take charge

Goes without saying! It’s the mentor -> mentee relationship. Just reiterating this one as it must be clear who is leading the way. Oh.. you don’t know the answer? I thought you were a mentor? It is your job to learn on the fly and to deliver results. You’ll have a far better time following this principal.

Summing up

Teaching programming is rewarding. The challenges are dynamic and you always have to be one step ahead. But it is also a very, very rewarding career. Relating a student’s real-world experiences helps them to better understand new concepts, and don’t forget to show positivity and patience – who knows they might just come back!

I hope you found this post helpful – if you’re interested in becoming a programming mentor then head over to VIRTUAL PROGRAMMING TUTOR and submit your application.
Work where you want, when you want – at your own price.

Happy coding!

If you want to get in on the bot action, here’s a simple way to do it. Check out Burger Bot, which is all about your fast food experience. However, for us this is a really simple bot just to show you how things work.

There are three main parts to it:

• The front-end, which runs in your browser, and allows you to enter messages.
• The back-end which exposes an API for the front-end to call, and which communicates with…
• The Watson Conversation service, which runs in Bluemix(IBM’s cloud development platform).

The front-end and back-end are included in the github project, as well as the training data for the Conversation service itself.

How does it all fit together?

The basic flow of the bot is as follows:

• A user enters some text in the front-end.
• The front-end calls back-end via an API, sending the user’s text.
• The back-end adds in the necessary credentials and then sends it to the Watson Conversation service.
• Watson Conversation determines the intent of the text and responds appropriately to the back-end, which then sends it back to the front-end so it can display Watson’s response.

How do we train Watson?

In order to train Watson Conversation for your particular use-case, you need to create an instance of the Conversation serviceon Bluemix. Have a look at the README in the github project for more details on how to do this.

Once you have an instance of the service, you need to create a workspace, which is a container for all the parts of your bot’s brain. This consists of three main parts:

• Intents
• Entities
• Dialog

Intents and entities are a way to teach Watson how to understand the user’s input. The intent defines the user’s overall meaning, and entities are particular attributes mentioned by the user. The dialog enables you define the behavior of the bot in response to the intents and entities. If you want to know more about intents, entities and dialog, take a look at the three short videos referenced at the bottom of this article. For now, let’s move on and make use of these concepts …

The Burger Bot project includes a pre-built workspace that you can import into Watson in order to train Watson. However, in this article we’ll build a workspace from scratch to help you understand what’s going on.

Build it

• Go to the Conversation tooling, and click “Create” on the Workspaces page to create a new workspace.
• Once create, you will be automatically navigated inside the workspace to the Intents page.
• Click “Create new” and enter a name for the intent, e.g. “order”, and then provide some examples of ordering, e.g. “can I order a burger ?”, “I would like a hotdog”, “pizza please”.
• Click “Done” to save the new intent.
• Now we need to add an entity for the food that can be ordered, so navigate to the Entities page.
• Click “Create new”, enter a name for the entity, e.g. “food”, and add a value for each type of food, e.g. “burger”, “hotdog”.
• OK, now Watson can understand some input, so let’s define how Watson should respond to that. Navigate to the Dialog page.
• Click “Create”. This will build you a very basic dialog tree. The dialog tree consists of nodes where each node has a condition and some output. When the user sends a message, the node conditions are checked in order (top to bottom) until one matches. The “Fallback” node catches any input that didn’t match another previous node. The “Welcome” node is also a special node in that it provides a response which only happens at the beginning of a conversation.
• Let’s add a node to handle our #order intent. Select the 3-dot menu on the “Welcome” node and you will see some options to add nodes. Adding a node above or below allows you to add an alternative conversation path, i.e. a node that will be checked before/after the particular selected node has been checked and failed to trigger. Adding a child node allows you to add to an existing conversation path, i.e. a follow on node to the selected node, which will only be activated on a subsequent user input after the selected node has been triggered. We want to start a new conversation path so add a node below the “Welcome” node.
• You will see the details of your new node in the node editor on the right. Enter a name for the node, e.g. “Order”.
• Now we have to decide when this node should trigger so we need to enter a condition to describe this. In this case we want it to trigger if the user’s input matches the #order intent, so enter “#order” as the condition.
• We also only want this node to trigger if they mention a food, so click the + button beside your #order condition, and enter @food.
• Now of course, we need to ask if they want fries with it, so in the response section, add a response of “Would you like fries with that?”.
• Now we need to be able to handle their response to the fries question, so go back to the Intents page and add a new intent #yes which has some examples of saying yes, e.g. “yes”, “yep”, “ok”, etc. It’s also good to create a #no intent as well.
• Now go back to your dialog, and select the “Order” node and add a child node. This will add a follow on node to handle the user’s response to the fries question; let’s call the node “Fries”.
• Add a condition to the follow on node, i.e. #yes.
• Add a response, e.g. “OK, I’ve added fries to your order”.
• Now a node below the “Fries” node. We will use this to handle if the user says anything other than yes. Add a condition of “anything_else” — this is a special condition that will always trigger if it reaches this node.
• Add a response, e.g. “OK, no fries with that”.
• Now click the speech bubble button in the top right of the page. This opens the Try It Out panel, which allows you to test the conversation you’ve just written.
• Try it out!

What did you order?

So we now have a simple working bot, but it doesn’t actually remember what food you ordered. We can remember things by storing them in context. Select the “Order” node, and click the 3 dots button beside the response, and select “JSON”. Now add a “context” object and store the food like this:

Now we can print out the food they ordered in our final responses. Select the #yes node, and change the response to show the food: “Ok, so that’s a $food and fries”, and the “anything_else” node’s response to “Ok, just a $food”.

How do I make this bot available?

Now you can point the app to use this workspace, by using the workspace ID of this workspace — see the instructions in the github project.

There may be a chance that you have some malware, spyware, 

or adware that is using your Internet connection in the 

background without your knowledge. Here’s how to see what’s

 going on under the hood.
It’s worth noting that most third-party firewalls will probably give you 

this same type of information as well as block things that are trying to

 connect… unless the applications managed to add an exclusion already. 

Better check anyway.

So, how do you find out what the problem is? There is an easy method using the netstat 

command from a command prompt window. This works with Windows 10, 8, 7, Vista, and XP.

 If you’re still using XP, make sure you are running at least Service Pack 2, 

and just assume that somebody already hacked your computer because your operating 

system is now a teenager.
We will use the netstat command to generate a list of everything that has made an

 Internet connection in a specified amount of time. To use the netstat command, 

you must run the command prompt window as administrator.
press windows key plus r and type cmd. press enter.(make sure you run it as admin)
At the command prompt, type the following command and press Enter.
    netstat -abf 5 > activity.txt
The –a option shows all connections and listening ports, the –b option 

shows you what application is making the connection, and the –f option 

displays the full DNS name for each connection option for easier 

understanding of where the connections are being made to. 

You can also use the –n option if you wish to only display the IP address.

 The 5 option will poll every 5 seconds for connections to make it more easy to track 

what is going on, and the results are then piped into the activity.txt file.

Wait about two minutes and then press Ctrl + C to stop the recording of data.

Once you’ve finished recording data, you can simply open the activity.txt file in your 

favorite editor to see the results, or you can type activity.txt at the command line to

 open it in Notepad.
The resulting file will list all processes on your computer (browsers, IM clients, 

email programs, etc.) that have made an internet connection in the last two minutes,

 or however long you waited before pressing Ctrl + C. It also lists which processes

 connected to which websites.
If you see process names or website addresses with which you are not familiar, you 

can search for “what is (name of unknown process)” in Google and see what it is. 

It may be a system function you don’t know about or a function of one of your running 

programs. However, if it seems like a bad site, you can use Google again to 

find out how to get rid of it.

You constantly worry that you are not good enough.

How To Over Come Self-Doubting As a Developer? Look at the developers around you. They seem to have everything together. Their code is cleaner than yours. They debug much faster than you do. They merely glance at the documentation before knowing what they need. They are confident. They enjoy coding.

But you, you are worried. You worry that you don’t know enough about the framework and the language you are using. You worry about introducing bugs. You worry about catching up with the hottest technologies. You worry that you are not talented enough. Things don’t come naturally to you. You think to yourself: “Maybe I’m not meant to be a developer.”

If any of these self-doubting thoughts sound familiar to you, you are not alone. Google “self-doubt developers”, and you will find over 2 million results in less than a second.

I was you.

For a period of time, I also experienced intense self-doubt, wondering if I would ever “make it”. It happened in college when I was practicing and preparing for job interviews. Each day, those algorithm problems made me feel like a complete failure. I was stressed and worried, as much as you might be now.

Eventually, my practice paid off and I received multiple job offers from prestigious tech companies. Along the way, I learnt two important lessons that changed my view of programming and eliminated my self-doubting thoughts. I’m sharing them with you now. Hopefully, they help.

Lesson #1: Learning programming is exactly the same as building muscles

To learn to play soccer, you need to go to the field and play. To build stronger muscles, you need to go to the gym and lift those weights. To learn programming, you need to sit down and code.

After lifting weights, you will feel sore and tired the next day. When stuck on a programming problem, your brain will (literally) hurt and you will get frustrated.

You won’t give up working out simply because of feeling sore. You know it’s part of the process. But when you get stuck while programming, you might start doubting yourself, wondering if you are talented enough. Because: (1) you think getting stuck is your fault, (2) others make it seemed effortless.

1. Getting stuck is part of the process.

Maybe no one has told you that, but it’s absolutely normal to get stuck during programming. It happens even to senior developers. A big part of programming is about figuring out why what you expected to happen didn’t happen. If you agree that expecting a child to be able to walk the first time he or she stands up is absurd, why would you expect the first draft of your code to run perfectly without any bugs?

I remember times when I got stuck for so long that I wanted to bang my head against a wall. I know it’s hard and frustrating (especially when dealing with issues related to dev environments). But hang in there. Dig into the issue. Ask Google. Ask a friend. Take a walk. You will eventually solve it and move on. And as you gain more experience, you will gradually get stuck less.

Next time you get stuck, don’t give yourself a hard time. Remind yourself it’s not your fault. It’s normal. It’s part of the process.

PS — Setting up a dev environment might be the most difficult part of programming.

It’s very common to get stuck and spend days on setting up a development environment. These are moments that might crush your soul. You try to follow the instructions step by step. But random errors keep showing up in every single step. The instructions make it seem easy, but it’s not. It’s not your fault getting stuck. 99.99% of the people reading that tutorial get stuck. The remaining 0.01% are the lucky ones who happen to have the exact same operating system setup as the instructor.
It’s unfortunate that the first step of learning to program is also the most frustrating and soul-crushing part. When you see errors you can’t understand, just copy the exact error message and Google it. (Putting quotes around the error message or just search the first half of the message might help.) Try different solutions until you find the one that works. And move on.

Pardon me for repeating: getting stuck at this stage is not your fault. We ALL do.And I promise programming will become a lot more fun once you get past this stage.

2. We confuse “genetically smart” with “appeared smart because the person has spent tons of time on related subjects”

During my last semester in college, my friends were amazed by how well I did in the Advanced Data Structures & Algorithms class. I made it seem effortless while they were struggling.

What they didn’t know was that months before the class, to prepare for interviews, I had spent countless hours practicing coding challenges, which covered the exact same topics as the class: dynamic programming, depth-first search, breadth-first search, etc. It appeared effortless only because I had already been through these struggles.

When I first self-taught these concepts, I would spend hours staring at a problem and couldn’t figure it out. When I gave up and looked up solutions online, I struggled to understand them. When I finally did, I felt even more frustrated because I doubted I would ever be smart enough to come up with such a solution myself.

Sometimes even when I encountered the exact same problem again, I might’ve still had no clue on how to approach it. I would get so stressed that I had to take long hot showers to calm myself down.

So believe me when I say that I know how it feels to doubt yourself and worry that you can’t make it. I have been there before. And I can assure you that you are not alone. Many great developers have been through the same.

Next time you are struggling while people around you are excelling, don’t think it’s because you are not talented enough. Most likely, they just have more exposure to the subject, or similar subjects, than you. Their brains have built up the “muscles” to handle this type of subject. After you get through your current struggles, you will appear smart and effortless as well.

It’s all about reps and sets.

You build muscles by exercising them. The more effort you put in, the longer you train, the stronger you become. Learning programming has the exact same process. The more time you spend coding, the more proficient you will be. You reap what you sow.

Lesson #2: Focus on your craft, not you

Stop thinking about how good or how bad of a programmer you are. If you are in the bottom 5% of your team, you want to get better. If you are in the top 5%, you still want to get better. No matter how good or bad you are, there are always people in front of you and people behind you. So why waste time thinking about it?

Instead, focus on your craft. Stop asking how good you are. Ask how good your code is. How can you make it better, faster, more readable? Surround yourself with engineers you admire. Read their code. How is it different than yours? What are the trade-offs they are making?

If you already work as a software engineer, someone is paying you to write code. You should pause and reflect on it, as it means a lot: someone either believes in your coding skill or sees your potential. The only way to live up to that potential is to focus on your craft and improve it relentlessly.

Action Item: Start keeping track of small wins

When was the last time you got stuck and weren’t sure if you could solve the problem? How did you eventually solve it?

Open a new Google Doc and write it down.

Next time you doubt yourself, take a look at the doc and remind yourself: if you could solve that last problem, you will solve this one as well.

Use the doc to keep track of challenging problems you overcame and what you learned from them. Always, always celebrate these small wins!

Cheers!
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Follow the 4 simple steps below to check your 2018 JAMB UTME result online without scratch card i.e. FREE!

1. Go to JAMB portal at

CHECK UTME RESULT NOW!
2. On the space provided Typ your Jamb Reg number/email address

3. Click on ‘Check My result’.

4. The portal will load your result if it’s ready.

NB: If the portal returns with ‘You Do Not Have Any Result Yet’, that implies your result is still being processed. So you have to check back later.

Whenever someone logs into Gmail (or any other login service), a file called a “cookie” is sent to their computer. This cookie allows the user to stay logged in, even if they leave Gmail. A packet sniffer can find cookies being transferred over a wireless network. When you find a Gmail cookie, you can open it on your computer and potentially access your target’s inbox. You’ll need to be connected to the same wireless network as your target
Download and install Wireshark
 Wireshark is a free network monitoring utility that you can download from Click Here to Download It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Installing Wireshark is a straightforward process. Follow the prompts like you would with most programs.
Download Cookie Cadger
This is a Java program that will will find and intercept cookies being sent across the wireless network. Cookie Cadger doesn’t need to be installed. It works the same in every operating system.
Connect to the same wireless network your target is connected to
You will need to be connected to the same wireless network as your target. This means you’ll need to be close.
Launch Wireshark. 
Wireshark will need to be running in order for Cookie Cadger to work.
Run Cookie Cadger and select your wireless adapter.
Select the adapter connected to the wireless network from the drop-down menu. You should see the main frame populate with unsecured cookies from other people using the network.
Use the domain filter to find Google cookies. 
The second column will display a list of domains that Cookie Cadger is finding cookies for. Look for Google domains, particularly mail.google.com
Click “Replay This Request” when you’ve found a Gmail cookie. 
This will load the cookie into your own web browser. The right cookie will take you directly to the target’s inbox