The Stockbroker Grapevine problem involves finding the shortest amount of time to spread rumours to all stockbrokers in a given set of networks. If there exists a stockbroker who cannot be reached in a particular network, the program should warn the user of a disjoint network.

This little exercise requires the use of Dijkstra’s infamous shortest path algorithm. My solution is inspired by that of my university tutor (Enoch Lau) and was coded as a tutorial exercise for the INFO3220 Object Oriented Design in C++.

Source code is available on GitHub.

Anyone who has done serious software development work will probably have programmed a booking system. This is because of the nature of the system itself—it easily covers fundamental concepts found in software development such as data storage, information retrieval, output formatting and user interaction. The flight booking system that I wrote for SOFT1901 Software Development 1 (Advanced) assignment is one such program. Written in Java on my first semester at Sydney Uni, this program might not be the most efficient in terms of performance, but feel free to have a look if you want to grasp the common practices of software development.

Source code and documentation are available on GitHub.

If one delves hard enough into Facebook, one may find a page containing some of the most demanding puzzles in computer science. Note that it is advertised as Engineering Puzzles, but I feel that it’s more of a computer science nature since it requires the solutions to be coded in programming languages.

The US release of iPhone 4 was marred with user complaints and legal actions, mainly for the antenna problems. There were also reports of discolouration and yellow spots on the edge of the screen, similar to that of the latest iMac when it was launched. Apparently, Apple’s official touch-screen supplier, HTC, was at fault for the screen problem as pre-orders for the device soared following its announcement, greatly overwhelming its production capacity.

I hope that these issues get sorted out before the Australian release sometime in July.