Dancing-links: Understanding how the algorithm works
I’ve been writing a little recently about a program I wrote to solve sudoku and other problems using the dancing links algorithm. This was how I explained it when someone asked for information about...
View ArticleDesign Pattern: Wrapper with Composable Actions
Name And Classification Wrapper with Composable Actions. An extension to the Wrapper pattern that allows operations to be composed on wrapped objects. This pattern is well known in another context, but...
View ArticleThe Madness of the HTML5 FileSystem API
I’m quite excited about the possibilities that the FileSystem API opens up to web applications. At the moment it’s only implemented in Chrome, but the w3c has a spec and I hope to see it in other...
View ArticleSoleMirror
Particularly when I start a new web project, I often find myself wanting a javascript console that I can embed in a page. The consoles built into modern browsers are usually very good, but it’s also...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Money: Where it comes from and where it might go
Everyone eventually wonders why people use money when it doesn’t have any ‘intrinsic’ value. It can feel like a house of cards built over an abyss. Of course the answer is that people want money...
View ArticleSolarPosition
I’ve ported some C code designed to calculate the suns position into javascript. It’s all part of my plan to make a clock that shows the local sunrise and sunset times on its face. Given a bewildering...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Modern Times: A New Clock
If you’re a regular reader, you might know that I occasionally play with different ways of representing time. I’ve come up with my latest version which I call UIT, and you can see it on github. Clock...
View ArticleOur Quest to Recruit People Who Can Actually Code
It seems that everyone who has ever been involved in hiring programmers has been amazed at how many people there are out there who are unable to solve even basic problems with code. The most rigorous...
View ArticleDynamic Source Maps
I’ve been looking at source maps recently. The reason for this is that I want to be able to pass some code through a pipeline of transformations, but still maintain sourcemaps so that you get the nice...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How do We Make Encryption More Accessible?
This post is about a program I wrote to publish public keys in gravatar images. You can try it (if you’ve got a gravatar account) here or look at the source here. HELO 250 Hello, I am glad to meet you...
View Article