Computers & Programming

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…

Although I do a bit of rock climbing now and then, this post is about cam lobes like those in car engines, not those used for rock climbing protection. Finding End Circle Location I was discussing this with my dad because he is building a model engine. He’s…