Archive for August, 2008

Project Euler Problem 6

Onwards to… Problem 6 The sum of the squares of the first ten natural numbers is, 12 + 22 + … + 102 = 385 The square of the sum of the first ten natural numbers is, (1 + 2 + … + 10)2 = 552 = 3025 Hence the difference between the sum of the squares of the first ten [ READ MORE ]

Magic Numbers and Other Numerical Nightmares

There are many coding practices that are near-universally regarded as ‘bad’, yet somehow keep cropping up over and over again. Conditional-branch abuse (including, yes, gotos). Deep nesting. Cryptic variable names. Global variables. Tight coupling. Entangled business/presentation logic. I could go on. Why do we keep doing it? Convenience? Laziness? Tiredness? Is unreadable spaghetti code some sort [ READ MORE ]

Ubuntu, Xmonad, and an Ode to Apt

This weekend I finally got around to updating my main Linux box from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04 (yes, I know, 4 months late – but moving fast!). The highly excellent xmonad has made it into the main Ubuntu repositories, so I discarded my own build and grabbed the packaged version – which promptly didn’t work [ READ MORE ]

Dynamic Async Batching with PFX

The PFX Team blog has been posting some excellent articles recently on the subject of task batching using the June 2008 CTP release of the Task Parallel Library. It’s really cool to see some of these techniques abstracted properly in .Net, and I hope it eventually becomes part of the core libraries. I’ve been playing around [ READ MORE ]