We don’t want to be free. Neo is our enemy, not our savior. Most of us have seen The Matrix, or are at least familiar with the story. Neo is our hero in the movie, a virtual god in training, selflessly seeking to destroy the Matrix and free the enslaved humans therein. Yet, curiously, one [...]

In a recent post, I had this sequence of characters (which I’m expressing this way to avoid repeating the problem): <single-quote><backslash><numeral zero><single-quote>. That’s the NULL character, if you didn’t know. It broke my feed. I’m not sure if it was IE or WordPress, but either way is bad so I replaced the offending sequence with [...]

Jeff Atwood had an interesting post about software spoilage, in which he quotes PC World’s list of no-longer-good-too-bloated applications which includes Windows Media Player 11. Are they kidding? WMP11 is a LOT better than WMP 9 and 10. It has better organization, and the fact that I can do instant filtering on albums, genres, artists, [...]

This is part three of my series on fast searching and filtering of text using C#. The previous article developed an indexing method using a hash table. This article develops a method using a trie structure. If you don’t know tries, I highly encourage to go read about them before continuing. This filtering method is [...]

One of my co-workers (and a contributor to my still on-going BuyMeALego project) has some family members with a beautiful home in West Virginia, available for rental to anyone interesting in a get-away to one of the most beautiful parts of the country I have ever been to. The surrounding area is wooded, there are [...]

One of the most interesting sponsors to my Buy Me a Lego campaign is a company called Kidz Worxx. They have a unified line of artwork-related items aimed at children. I think this is stuff my sister, who is an artist, would have loved as a kid. From the site description: A child friendly, easy [...]

This is part two of my series on fast searching/filtering of text using C#. In the previous article, we developed the filtering interface, built up a testing framework and implemented a naive indexer. For many purposes, that indexer performs more than adequately. Still, there are other possible implementations that might work better (or not…let’s wait [...]

Even though I recently wrote about just using naive algorithms when they’re sufficient, it helps to know about other options and their characteristics. With that mind, I’m beginning a little series (4 parts planned–I’ll update this list as I go along) in C# documenting how I developed a few different approaches to doing fast (instant) [...]

Fantasian Kingdoms looks like a very interesting game, and they are one of the more interesting sponsors of my Buy Me a Lego campaign. From the homepage: Fantasia is a distant planet ruled by a mysterious race known as Fantasians. This planet is stuck in constant turmoil due to the magical force hidden deep within [...]

Thank you Paul, for your contribution to my Buy Me A Lego campaign! Paul runs a store at BrickLink called Bricks that Stick. He’s got quite a few parts. If you need Legos, please go check him out! Technorati Tags: Lego, Legos, BuyMeALego