October 2012

In space, no one can hear you scream! I think that was the tag line for a movie like Friday the 13th in Space. Interestingly, it is true. Joss Whedon is about the only movie maker who ever (in recent years) stuck with scientific facts and had no…

I have updated my programming projects page to include a reference to the Windows Phone projects that I have been working on. It is a commercial app made for a client. It is a port of their existing Android app. Programming Projects This has been a very interesting…

Because my creativity seldom ventures far from home. Planetary Defense is a fun game. Not so much on a tablet because tapping the screen actually makes it hard to see what’s going on when a big finger obscures the tiny incoming bombs. But it’s sort of fun and…

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . There was a time when computer displays only showed text. A programmer might print out a period for every 1000 records of a large database that updated. As the program runs,…

Thinking Out Loud… I wrote, well mostly ported, an Android app to the Windows Phone (WP7) and I am having a bit of trouble dealing with the navigation model. I have two problems; Tombstoning and passing data between pages. Tombstoning is a problem that I cannot solve until…

I recently got back to improving the crossword puzzle generator. The previous algorithm would only allow for clumps of four letters by pre-searching the word list and forming four word clumps. When the placement algorithm was running, it would try to place those four word clumps onto the…

Last night, I decided that I would port my circletest program to JavaScript. I use the circletest program to test various geometric constructions. Most of the geometry related programming that I do is accomplished using techniques that are traditionally manual operations. A lot of interesting things can be…