With the September 2009 article, I decided to present a discussion of how the constant π (pi) was calculated in antiquity and over the ages, together with a layman’s rehash of an article I’d written a while ago on how to write a program to calculate it. The nice thing about writing code to calculate π is that it shows off Machin’s formula and writing a minimal “big number” library to perform the calculation. […]
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photo © 2007 Beverly | more info(via: Wylio)
UPDATE (6-Feb-2017) Wylio still exists, but is now a paid subscription, plus in making it so they broke all their previous photo URLs. Having just spent a couple of hours redoing the markup for all the photos I've used, I do not recommend it at all any more. […]
For some reason, for August 2009’s article, I decided to take a bite out of computational geometry; what can only be described as a ruddy large subject. I mean, it’s huge. And it’s mathematical, to boot. I must have been delusional. Anyway, I touched on three fairly simple and well-known algorithms, well-known because they date from the very early days of computer science. […]
READ MOREI’ve been a bit remiss in posting these photos, but a friend reminded me yesterday that I’d promised to show off my “new” car. […]
READ MOREA couple of months ago I finished an article for PCPlus about algorithms for solving Rubik’s Cube. It’ll appear in issue 298 in September 2010. […]
READ MOREFor July 2009, I managed to snuff out something about ropes, a kind of heavier programming type than string. Apart from the pun/joke, it was an interesting article to research. I have no recollection any more about how I came across the rope type; presumably it was through a late night surfing session, fueled with some microbrew. […]
READ MORERecently it seems that I’ve been banging my head against the ceiling of my 128GB drive in my laptop. My drive comes up red in Windows Explorer every now and then and red is the color that makes you panicky. And before you say, “128GB? How old is this laptop?” let me explain that it’s an SSD and that’s all I could afford at the time I upgraded the drive. […]
READ MOREJune 2009’s article was a reversion to what might be called straight computer science after a few months of layman’s topics (indexing the internet, spellchecking, etc) and covered ternary trees. Quick overview: ternary trees are a speedy, space-efficient data structure for storing large numbers of key-value pairs that in certain situations are better than hash tables. […]
READ MOREIn playing around with my blog’s new iPhone support I came across a doozy of a problem. […]
READ MOREThis blog uses GraffitiCMS as the blogging engine. This software has now been open-sourced by the original developers, Telligent, and is available on CodePlex. Although it’s pretty full-featured and does most of what I want and need from a blogging engine (and has lots of features I don’t use) there is no built-in support as yet for providing a special view for mobile devices. […]
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