The UMBC ACM student chapter will host the second meetup of Baltimore Code Craftsmanship user group at 6:45pm on Thursday, October 24 in the ITE building on the UMBC Campus.

This meetup is for the students and software developers in the Baltimore area that care about the quality of their work and want to practice and improve their programming skills, share what they know and learn new things from others.

Members of the UMBC community can RSVP for the event by completing this form. More details can be found on the form or below. Participants outside of the UMBC community should register on the meetup site. Registration for this meetup is available for a limited number of participants.

This is a hands on coding user group with no presentations. Each meeting will be a dojo where we will go through a challenging software craftsmanship exercise that focuses on clean code, test-driven development, design patterns, and refactoring. We will pair up and practice on a kata in order to learn and apply the values, principles, and disciplines of software craftsmanship. Come with your laptop equipped with your favorite programming and automated unit testing environment. If you don’t have a laptop, come anyway, we will need only one laptop for every two people. Be prepared to pair up, learn, share and have fun!

The event is open to all UMBC students, however programming ability is required. Interested faculty members can join in too! This can also be a good opportunity to network with professionals from various companies and get yourself noticed for any job opportunities that exist.

If you have questions or suggestions, send email to Primal Pappachan (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ) or Vladimir Korolev (Sorry, you need javascript to view this email address. ).

How much would you be willing to pay for Sony’s upcoming gaming console?

Gamers in Brazil are are asking themselves that question quite a bit these days.

In Brazil, the Playstation 4 will cost you an arm and a leg (or two), plus your wallet laden with cash and a debit card (or two). The console will launch at 3,999 Brazilian Real, or approximately $1850 US dollars.

Why so much? According to Sony Brazil, Brazil’s heavy import taxes account for 60 to 70 percent of the cost.

Keep in mind that the average Brazilian earns far lower wages than the average American earns.

While the PS4 seems to have an advantage over the Xbox One heading into the holiday launch season in the US, in Brazil the reverse may be true. The Xbox One may have an edge over the crazy expensive PS4 for retailing at a mere $1015 US dollars.

It will be interesting to see just how many consoles are sold in Brazil in the year ahead.

At those prices, you can be sure  there will soon be a thriving market for smuggled consoles… they might cost you just an arm and one leg.

Let’s establish something guys: The United States isn’t stupid.

…So why is Time Magazine treating us as if we are?

Each week the international news periodical chooses several different covers to distribute to different world audiences.

Looking at a selection of American covers over the years it appears the folks at Time have a low opinion of  America’s high intellect.  

We’ll cut Time some slack. After all, the US is a very specific region. We care more about China then we’ll ever care about TinTin .  It’s smart business to put emphasis on local stories that resonate more with our population.

 But it’s time to draw some lines…

How about when Putin took the lead in the Syria debates? We got a cover about college sports.

An impending epidemic? Nah, Americans are more interested in Vegas

 What should Americans be anxious about? Certainly not Egypt. 

And don’t even DREAM of talking about a Guantanamo Bay. Guantanamo is Voldemort -that is to say- we don’t talk about it. Heaven forbid Time offend anyone’s delicate sensibilities!

See, we know that everyone who buys the magazine is going to get the same information inside, but that doesn’t hide the fact that they are concealing stories that (under any other circumstance) could be thought-provoking.

The American community is a diverse community. Our people, our culture, our ideas, they are the very products of globalization. Don’t we deserve a magazine that’s just as diverse as we are?

(To see all the varying covers feel free to browse Time’s website)

Stand aside cocaine… you now have competition.

A recently conducted study by a neuroscience student at Connecticut College determined that Oreo cookies are literally as addictive, if not more addictive, than cocaine.

Now you’re probably thinking: How did this student conduct this research and how can I be a test subject.

Jamie Honohan, a recent graduate and leader of the project, decided to study how the overwhelming presence of unhealthy foods in low-income residential areas contributed to the nation’s obesity problem.

The team used two groups of rats as test subjects (despite offers by some of his student colleagues).

Some were injected with cocaine and others were fed bits of an Oreo cookie. The rats were then placed in a maze with a rice cake on one side and either cocaine or Oreos on the other side. As it turns out,

the students found that the rats who had been fed Oreos spent as much time on the Oreo side as the rats who had been injected with the drugs spent on the drug side, indicating that the link they made between the “pleasurable effects” of Oreos/drugs and that specific environment was equally strong.

Not only would the rats eat the creamy center of the cookie first, but a larger number of pleasure neurons were activated in the rats by the Oreos than the cocaine.

Watch out the next time you break open a container of Oreos- you might eat one too many.

Mac apps will soon be available through the Volume Purchase Program, allowing businesses and educational institutions to purchase multiple copies of your apps at once. To make your apps available through the Volume Purchase Program, simply agree to the latest Mac Developer Program License Agreement and all attached Schedules, and make sure your tax and banking information is set up in iTunes Connect. You can also offer a discount for educational institutions by marking the "Discount for Educational Institutions" box. Learn more.

When OS X Mavericks becomes available later this fall, apps running on OS X Mountain Lion or later can no longer use temporary sandboxing entitlements for composing email with Apple Mail. Please update your apps to use Scripting Targets instead. To learn more, read Adopting Scripting Targets for Composing Mail.