Cell Phone Secrets

How to choose a cell phone in 2006, if you want the best possible radio.

The simple and obvious way to walk through a graph

At some point in your programming career you may have to go through a graph of items and process them all exactly once. If you keep following neighbours, the path might loop back on itself, so you need to keep track of which ones have been processed already.

Finding Bieber: On removing duplicates from a set of documents

Using a locality sensitive hash, you can mark duplicates in millions of items in no time.

5 Ways PowToon Made Me Want to Buy Their Software

Even though I saw through their tricks at every step along the way, I am now a customer and proud of it. It is worthwhile to look at what they did, because these are simple things that you can do to improve your software business.

Regular Expression Matching can be Ugly and Slow

If you open the first few pages of O'Reilly's Beautiful Code, you will find a well written chapter by Brian Kernighan (Personal motto: "No, I didn't invent C. Who told you that?"). The non-C inventing professor describes how a limited form of regular expressions can be implemented elegantly in only a few lines of C code.

Why don't web browsers do this?

Why don't web pages start as fast as this computer from 1984?

Sign here (comic)

When programmers design web sites (comic)

The PenIsland Problem: Text-to-speech for domain names

Recently, I was contracted to run a list of domain names through the custom-built pronunciation engine that powers my rhyming web site. On the first attempt, I found that the results were embarrassingly bad. A quick inspection revealed the problem: most domain names are severalwordsstucktogether.

Drawing Graphs with Physics

To my surprise, I found that there is a very simple way to arrange graphs that can be expressed in only a few lines of code, using force-directed placement...