A few months ago The Press was running a series of Math weeks pages, and they had Sudoku puzzles in them. Michaela was cutting them out for me. I think they are great.

I was at a job interview, and I mentioned them as fun, and in the second interview I was given one and asked to design a solver. With 30 minutes to capture the process that is very brute force, I got sidetracked by one of the requirements of been efficient. So was trying to think of ways to trade space for time. But it was fun talking through my design with the two interviewers at the end of the thirty minutes.

Anyway, I was reading Adam Bar’s blog today and he was talking about them, and I remembered my interest in them, so went search for an online source of the fun. Here is the Sudoku web site, it’s great, with four levels of difficulty, game codes so you can challenge your friends, and timing. What more could you ask for.

Now this gives me motivation to write a puzzle solver.

I really like the referring site URL in the statistics section. Today I noticed a Google search, so I clicked to see how I was found. “PC-LINT” download warez what-the?, Google ranked this blog 4th for PC-Lint (a great product) & warez.

At first I though Google must be doing some voodoo as I’ve not talked about any of those things on this blog.

After refining the search to “PC-Lint” simeon showed my CV which explains the PC-Lint part of the results. Looking at the first result from the original search (a Slashdot page) didn’t have the warez or download word, so was matching only on PC-Lint which was only on the page once.

So that leaves the question why someone would want a warez version of this great tool. From the pricing page over at Gimpel a single seat is $239.00 USD, which is quiet a good price. If you were nasty you could even only purchase a single seat and install company wide. At Allied Telesyn we got 15 floating license for 80 people. So they are flexible, and a trusting company. Anyway I can’t recommend the tool enough if you’re doing C or C++.

Reading Mark’s blog, he had a snippet of grammar, following the links I got to Craig Kaplan’s it’s vs its. Growing up with a “learning difficulty” meant I was never 100% sure on the simple rules like this. So now I do. I find it funny how I’ll reword things to side step grammar rules I know I’m not 100% on. Now I feel empowered to it’s and its as required.

Also on that site was some cool Islamic Star Patterns research, quite cool patterns.

I returned this book to my mother-in-law, as it was not really interesting. The major premise was that under-earners sabotage their income, and are in perpetual debt. I can associate with the first point a little, but the second is not me.

Ether way, the book didn’t fit, and I didn’t find it intriguing enough.

I had to return this book to the library before I had completed it. This sort of indicates it did not grip me enough to complete it on time, but it was more that I didn’t start reading it until two nights before it was due back. I found it to be interesting and it had some interesting background of the forming of the New Zealand stock market. There was a ~101 tips which I didn’t get up to. I might get it out again to finish it.

I finished reading this book last week. It is Australian based, covering the basics of reading balance and profit/lose type reports found in prospectuses. It covers industrial and mining, and a little bit of tech.

I just read Joel’s latest article on Set Your Priorities.

The first part reminded me of one of the reasons I disliked working at ATR. Building features for single customers. Our best success came from building products that where applicable to a large number of situations. His 13 steps to personal hell I thought were well written with the later summary hitting the mark (for me)

“in fact what you’re really doing is letting your sales force pimp out your developers with the sole goal of maximizing their personal commissions.”

This pretty much sums up my feeling from ATR. The sales guys were blinded by the dollars and failed to consider they were just been used as leverage to lower Cisco’s price.

So thank you Joel for finding the words for some of my past unhappiness.

Well after 3 1/2 Hours I’ve got the first example program “SystemDrawingDemo” rewritten in C#. I was prepared to experiment with the VB code, but for a really clever reason I unselected VB when I installed VS2005, because who would ever need that feature? I good chunk of that time was spent trying to work out how to get the HInstance so I could extract the icon from exe’s.

So this VB code

Dim hIcon As IntPtr = ExtractIcon(Microsoft.VisualBasic.Compatibility.VB6.GetHInstance, file.FullName, 0)

becomes

IntPtr hInstance = (IntPtr)Marshal.GetHINSTANCE(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().GetModules()[0]).ToInt32();
IntPtr hIcon = ExtractIconA( hInstance, file.FullName, 0);

Which just smells like fragile code to me. But it’s only demo code….

I’ll post my code once I’ve converted the lot.

Mark has a posted to a new game.

You get three rounds of setting of an explosion (that expands and collapses) that triggers new explosion when touching the blue dots. The idea is to set off the largest chain reaction. Each round there are 50 points to earn. So the best score possible is 150.

Current best score: 125 ( 45, 40, 40 ) which is below Marks current of 130

Just got back from the .Net user group meeting on the System.Drawing namespace. Brent Clark did a good presentation, with plenty of code, examples and a refreshing amount of theory.

He showed how to do custom lists, and drawing on a panels, plus other bits. This is exactly what I have been wondering how to do, so I can now re-code my old Quick Basic, and line algorithms to C#. I’m looking forward to downloading his demo code and having a play.

Reading Visual Basic took a bit to workout how it mapped to C# syntax, but it was not undo-able.

The free pizza was great and Peter gave out some free Magazines at the beginning so I now have an International Developer to read.