So recently I had to figure out a way to quickly solve a problem involving 6GB of tab delimited text files. I have Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems at my disposal, and therefore have a plethora of “almost” solutions. I spent some time playing with the OS X/Linux tools awk and sed, but couldn’t [...]

I thought that this was an interesting perspective on programming refinement. Sometimes it can actually be more effective to write programs as if you were just learning how to program. You can get things done faster and more effectively. Your programs don’t always have to be ultra user-friendly or refined, but many times your programs [...]

I got a chance to play around with a Google CR-48 laptop today. It’s a pretty interesting device but way too barebones for my daily computing needs. I honestly don’t know if it would even be sufficient for me considering how I spend my time just browsing the web. I guess maybe I don’t fully [...]

“Yesterday the Census Bureau announced the new apportionment of the 435 representatives to states based on the 2010 census. Illinois lost one representative. Texas gains four. Not only do these affect the makeup of the House of Representatives but also the Electoral College that chooses the president. Since 1940 the apportionment is not done by [...]

“A catalog maintained by Bill Kinnersley of the University of Kansas lists about 2,500 programming languages. Another survey, compiled by Diarmuid Piggott, puts the total even higher, at more than 8,500. And keep in mind that whereas human languages have had millennia to evolve and diversify, all the computer languages have sprung up in just [...]

“In the world of enterprise programming, the mainstream is broad and deep. Code is written predominantly in one of a few major languages. For some shops, this means Java; for others, it’s C# or PHP. Sometimes, enterprise coders will dabble in C++ or another common language used for high-performance tasks such as game programming, all [...]

Well it looks like the Google A.I. Challenge is finally complete and the final results are now posted! This post is a follow up to my previous post announcing the contest, Google A.I. Challenge (shwuzzle.com). Normally, the top few spots are dominated by languages such as C/C++, but this year the top spot was written [...]

There are many things that we do in our code that makes it harder to understand, read, modify, etc. This article describes many of the common mistakes made by many undergraduate students and new programmers. Most of the code used as examples in the article is written in C, but the mistakes described can apply [...]