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PCPlus 291: Behind the minimax theorem

For February 2010’s issue, it was time for a more heavy-duty algorithm together with what my editor called a fun element. So, enter minimax and two-player zero-sum games. […]

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PCPlus 290: Testing for randomness

A familiar topic for me for the January 2010 issue: testing a pseudo-random number generator’s (PRNG) output for randomness. I say familiar because I’ve talked about it before, most recently in my book. Well, OK that was 10 years ago, but still, the techniques don’t change. And it’s extremely fascinating, to boot. […]

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Stupid wingnut emails...

American Idiot, On Broadway!photo © 2010 Bill Abbott | more info (via: Wylio)Long ago someone signed me up to get emails from this wacko right-winger. Her emails are unfailingly stupid/vapid, forwarded ad nauseam, written in deathless, breathless prose, and the all-caps multi-exclamation-marked topics are easily debunked by 5 seconds research on snopes.com. Consequently they are hilarious. […]

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JavaScript: Using a constructor without new

In my previous blog post on the subject of constructor functions, I mentioned that there is a convention in JavaScript to name constructor functions with an initial capital letter and ordinary functions with an initial lowercase letter. This way, since the language doesn’t stop you from using a constructor as an ordinary function, there is at least some kind of “warning” that you may be using a constructor and therefore need to use new. […]

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A JavaScript tip that’s jarring: remove falsy elements from array

Elijah Manor tweeted a link today for learnjs, a reader-supported site that provides tutorial videos on writing JavaScript. A pretty good resource to have to be sure, but there was one video there that brought me up short. […]

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Spokeo: all kinds of awesome. Not.

My wife sent me an email today about Spokeo.com. This is a site that aggregates public information on the internet about individuals and then sells it. The site allows you to remove yourself if you want to. (In essence, search for yourself, find the page, copy the URL, and then click on the Privacy link at the bottom of the page. They send you an email with a remove link.) I removed her because of her job, but I decided to see what they had on me. […]

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I have PCPlus Mail

I finally got round to reading the Christmas edition of PC Plus this evening and was pleasantly surprised to see that someone had written in about a recent article of mine: 10 mistakes every programmer makes. It’s going to be next year before I republish it here in this hallowed blog, but you can read it over at TechRadar.com right now. […]

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People of Colorado vs. Rabes, Erik Dean (continued)

4th Judicial DA logoJust over 3 years ago, I wrote a post about my wife Donna prosecuting a particularly nasty case of child pornography. The defendant, Erik Rabes, was charged with five counts: sexual assault on a child, sexual assault on a child by a person in a position of trust, two felony counts of sexual exploitation of a child, and a misdemeanor count of sexual exploitation of a child. It was the first ICAC (Internet Crimes Against Children) case that made it to trial in Colorado (usually the defendants in these kinds of cases plea out early). To summarize, Donna did a fantastic job prosecuting him and the jury found him guilty on all counts. He got two concurrent ten year sentences for the sexual assault counts, two consecutive 12-year sentences for the felony exploitation counts, and a concurrent 24 month sentence for the misdemeanor. Total elapsed time: 34 years. […]

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JavaScript for C# developers: writing a library (part 4)

Last time, I’d completed the cookie code. Well, “completed” in the sense of written it, but I now have to think about testing it. The writers of jQuery use a testing library called QUnit for their testing, so that’s what I’ll do too. […]

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PCPlus 289: Solve Sudoku

So, a bit of fun for the Christmas 2009 issue: solving Sudoku puzzles efficiently. Not if you’re a human, you understand, unless you’re the type of human who likes programming, but from the viewpoint of discussing algorithms for solving via computer. Because, once you’ve programmed how to solve a Sudoku puzzle, it’s pretty easy to then generate puzzles to solve. […]

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