Time to take a look at Python I guess

5
1747 days
by in miscellaneous

I was reading Reddit today and came across an interesting article titled Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle. My girlfriend and I enjoy doing Sudoku quite a bit, so an article about solving them obviously caught my eye. I clicked through and arrived at what appeared to be an essay written by Peter Norvig who is (was?) an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and now works at Google. If you’ve ever taken an AI course in school you’ve probably heard his name before. Norvig’s algorithmic genius is apparent by his simple attack of this potentially expensive problem. The elegance of his solution speaks to his years of programming experience and inherited wisdom. (more…)

Country list formatted for MySQL import

36
1758 days
by in miscellaneous

To break my hiatus here at dev|sushi I decided to publish something I made for myself while working on a project for my freelance business. The form I am creating requires a country selection box and then later to display country names within the application. Instead of doing a god awful static select box on the form and then storing the full country name in the database, I decided to use the MySQL table approach. Simple and effective and allows you to use a nice space saving char(2) over a varchar(150) in your other tables. (more…)

Kinetic Typography: typographic treatment of an audio sample

2
1805 days
by in miscellaneous

kinetic [adj.] Of, relating to, or produced by motion.
typography [n.] The general character or appearance of printed matter.

I was browsing through the typography tagged bookmarks on Ma.gnolia.com over the weekend and ran into a video that I found extremely engaging to watch. The video was comprised of lyrics moving on screen set to music; the timing of the words appearing was synchronized to the vocals too great effect. See for yourself. (more…)

MSN Video Sucks

6
1813 days
by in miscellaneous

Online video has now become a mainstay on the internet. There are hundreds of video hosting sites and literally millions of videos. Missed Jon Stewart’s latest headlines or that Bush zinger everyone at work is talking about? How about Stephen Colbert’s The Word segment? Don’t fret it is on the Internet. (more…)

Five things about me

1
1827 days
by in miscellaneous

I was tagged by Megan (soon to be) McDerrmott. The idea is that you say five things that people don’t know about you and then tag five other people. I’ll get to my five things in a moment but first I wanted to share some analysis that I did of this current meme. (more…)

Blackberry MP3 Player Instructions

10
1827 days
by in miscellaneous

I have previously commented on the Blackberry Pearl in an unfavourable but not totally bad light. I stand behind my position, this device will only satisfy a select market. That being said I wrote this up to give people a guide to using the media player on the Pearl as an MP3 player. By default it plays one file at a time which it not very useful.

Note: In order to use the Pearl as an MP3 player you must have added a MicroSD card to store the music on since the device memory is insufficient.

(more…)

ASP.Net file download protection through authentication

9
1831 days
by in miscellaneous

Recently at work I needed to allow for the download of sensitive files over the web. Right away your mind should jump to the security issues involved with such an undertaking. How do you allow for download without compromising the sensitive data? There is a simple but flexible method that will work perfectly. (more…)

ASP.Net Dynamic Controls (Part 4)

14
1844 days
by in miscellaneous

I’ve had several people ask about redrawing a page that contains Dynamic Controls. The idea is that you have a page with a “Save” button that posts back but the page reloads exactly as it was. You can think of it like the “Apply” button in Windows but on a web page. The heart of the issue is what is the proper way to redisplay the data in the dynamic controls since they don’t have a viewstate. (more…)

Rollyo Comment Spam

0
1859 days
by in miscellaneous

I’ve been getting a lot of comment spam lately of the Rollyo query variety. Rollyo is a web property that offers user customizable search. You create yourself a list of trusted sites and then your search is restricted to those sites only. Over time you build a strong list of these trusted sites so that you never have to look at spam-y search results again. Additionally it has some social aspects where you can add another persons list to yours or search another’s list directly. I believe this is where we get into the source of this type of spam. (more…)

ASP.Net Dynamic Controls (Part 3)

5
1871 days
by in miscellaneous

I have received a few requests via email and in comments for more detail on how to get your data back after postback with dynamic controls. This evening I started to put together some code examples and mulled over the details of the article in my head. The first step was to re-read my previous two articles so I could get my bearings on where to start. Part 1 of this series is an initial outline of how to create dynamic controls and use Request.Form to collect the data after postback. Part 2 went into detail on how to figure out which button was clicked to cause postback using a JavaScript technique. In the middle of re-reading the second article I had an epiphany. There is a better way to do that! The proper method is standards compliant, accessible and is outlined in the W3C HTML specifications. So I will put the original article on hold and explain this technique. (more…)

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