Yesterday afternoon I finished my latest PCPlus article on generating all possible arithmetic expressions with four operators. The article explored several algorithms, such as evaluating all full binary trees with a certain number of internal nodes (mine was four), evaluating an expression tree, and the like, and for the sidebar I slipped in a quick bit about RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) and how succinct it is for describing arithmetic expressions (there’s no operator precedence or parentheses to worry about). Equally important is the absolute ease with which you can evaluate an RPN expression compared to an algebraic one (that is, an expression using the standard infix notation). […]
READ MOREI’m in a show at the moment at the Fine Arts Center here in Colorado Springs (as it happens, tonight is opening night). We’re doing Crazy For You, a modern musical that marries up lots of great Gershwin tunes with a light 30s style plot. And tap dancing. Lots of tap dancing. Man, am I glad I’m not in those numbers: I get exhausted just watching. […]
READ MOREIt’s a little known fact that Roger Moore (he of the James Bond movies in the 70s and 80s and The Saint in the 60s) started out as a male model before he started to become more famous. As such, he was renowned for appearing in knitwear shots (to the extent of being known as ‘The Big Knit’) in the early 50s. […]
READ MOREThe last couple of weeks has been spent sorting out stuff from my parents’ house. Some to be shipped here to the States, some that my sister was taking, some Victoriana (mostly furniture) to be auctioned off, and the rest to be disposed of. One of the things from my past that I found was my first 35mm SLR camera. […]
READ MORETo say that the last three to four months have been grim is to understate it somewhat. On 13 December last year, in the middle of the night, Dad had a cardiac arrest and, being Dad, did nothing about it until the next morning when finally he was rushed to hospital. He died a week later of another heart attack, on 21 December. […]
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In the comments to my post on testing the lock-free stack, Dmitriy V'jukov wondered if my code could test a broken implementation of a stack built on a preallocated array. He provided a link to the code on a Russian forum (yes, I used Google Translate a lot). It seems it’s not his, but a friend’s or a colleague’s. […]
Having discussed a test app for testing the multithreaded use of the lock-free stack, it’s now time for the lock-free queue. […]
READ MORERecently a reader was having some issues with my lock-free queue implementation. In investigating the problem, I decided to throw out my previous “stack and queue” multithreaded test program as being way too hard to modify and started out afresh. In doing so, I also cleaned up the implementations of the lock-free stack and queue, making extensive use of CodeRush’s code issues functionality. […]
I was looking at the following lens, Canon EF-S 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS, on Amazon today. The reason is simple: my favorite zoom is the Canon 28-135mm and I also have a Canon 20-35mm zoom. This could replace both, in theory. At something like $340, it’s affordable too. But how good is it? […]
READ MOREEvery now and then I help out with cases in the Special Victims’ Unit (SVU) for the 4th Judicial District of Colorado, the district for which my wife is Deputy District Attorney. In general, the cases I help with on the periphery are the computer crime cases, mostly about child pornography (CP). […]
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