I solved the 110502 Reverse and Add problem today. The hardest part was whipping up the worker functions to do text based numbers.

I started by laying out the algorithm in function blocks, then proceeded to full in the gaps. I had two bugs

1. my is_palindrome function didn’t have a default return value. It was C++ but even that seems a bit broken, but it compiled!
2. my data structure could hold 10 digits (ie 1,234,567,890) as the problem stated, but that didn’t seem enough. Size 100 fixed that.

I haven’t done any simple problem work for a while, and I like the idea of doing some of the Rudy Quiz (albeit in C#), yet the testing structure of Programming Challenges site makes it a contained experience.

Well I finished Zelda tonight. ~79 hours of playing time. 17 4/5 hearts. 39 Poe souls. 15/20 Golden Bugs.

I ended up with many side quests that I could do, but just can’t make myself. I really enjoyed the story. There were some great boss fights. I could have completed it a lot faster but I was enjoying exploring, and see how things worked.

Now I just have to wait till November for Super Mario Galaxy.

In fact way more exciting than the Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2, is Jock Holmes version 1.0 released yesterday. Congratulations Mel and John.

From Darryl I learnt Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 is out. Damn it, I had only just gotten Beta 1 installed and working how I liked in my VPC at work.

Well I’m excited really about the new version, but more annoyed at all the system updates that wasted so much time this week, when all I want to do was experiment with Silverlight.

Now I’ve just got to not restart my dev machine over the next ~7 hours while it comes down.

I was wondering about Silverlight, but reading Soma’s details Silverlight 1.0 RC is due any day now also. Woot!

Today’s .Net User Group meeting was “It’s All About Silverlight“ was presented by Kelly Cliffe. It was all about Silverlight, and although Kelly mentioned it was his first public speaking since high school he gave a good talk.

The talk was 101 with meat, so maybe a 201 level with some stories from the battle field (~301 level tit bits).

At the end there were Mix 07 DVDs being handed out and I got Discs 1, 3, 7. So fueled up with Silverlight Cool-Aid I headed home to installed Orcas Beta 1 on my PC. The only thing missing from the DVD set was the “Microsoft Silverlight Tools Alpha for Visual Studio codename “Orcas” Beta 1“ and once that was all installed it just worked!

I had previously download a Digger(Boulderdash) Silverlight example that I found on Lutz Roeder’s site. It was a VS2005 project so I had fun coping it into a Orcas project and getting it working. Was quite useful seeing how the parts of the namespace/project/output names are used in the xaml etc (ie this was where my pain points were).  Of note is that my version only runs in IE yet Lutz’s current Digger runs fine in FireFox.

So now I have some working code, I need to think what I want to build. I’m not sure but it’s a heck of a lot more accessible than Flash has appeared to be. That might be the tipping point.

Testing that I can post to my new blog via Windows Live Writer, and then I think I’ll be ready for the swap over to occur.

So I’ll include a picture just to see how it all goes… (so I’ve removed the picture because something failed…)

Well pictures now work, but the URL is ugly WindowsLiveWritertoWordPres_xxxx

Well the main purpose of this post is to add fake comments so I can see the format, as the default import scripts don’t run, so I’m importing by hand. Makes sense as I’m going to have to import from live spaces also.

Here’s the Blogger Template I used to export my comments (based on Jerry’s post)

<Blogger>
AUTHOR: <$BlogItemAuthor$>
DATE: <$BlogItemDateTime$>
TITLE: <$BlogItemTitle$>
-----
BODY:
<$BlogItemBody$>
--------
<BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
<BlogItemComments>
COMMENT-AUTHOR:<$BlogCommentAuthor$>
COMMENT-DATE:<$BlogCommentDateTime$>
COMMENT-BODY:<$BlogCommentBody$>
--------
</BlogItemComments>
</BlogItemCommentsEnabled>
</Blogger>

Well here is my first post using WordPress. Quite excited by the whole thing. I now have my own domain, website/blog and it’s all mine.

Things on the to-do list are import all my old posts from simeonpilgrim.blogspot.com and simeonpilgrim.spaces.live.com

Now I can host my own code snippets, and stuff like that, just like I’ve always wanted…

Well the IS part of re-installing the operating system part has. Only took three goes. Something funny made it fail the first time. The second time my primary disk was named F: not C: so IS scripts didn’t work to well. Third time success!

Some of the things I’m doing differently this time. For starters I’m avoiding installing anything I can avoid.

One of those things was ScrewTurn Wiki, I had been running the Desktop Edition, and the team have been using it, so it’s now on the build machine, via IIS. Issues that needed solving:

• Repairing .Net Framework 2.0 after installing IIS 5.1 - MS KB555583
• Give <MachineName>\ASPNET modify privilege to the Wiki folder

Changed from using a cough borrowed version of CASE Studio 2 Lite to using the freeware Toad Data Modeler. Same program, same issues, but legit!

Plenty more tools I have not installed yet that I will have to, but the aim is to keep the machine fast and responsive as long as possible.

The Amazon order has arrived, now I just need to read the book, what I need is a long weekend holiday in Wellington to read it over. What luck I’m also off to Wellington tonight.

Will review once finished…