There’s a TV program on the BBC at the moment that we’re watching called Celebrity Masterchef. In it a bunch of celebrities (90% of which are completely unknown to me) tackle preparing and cooking dishes, competing against each other for the best one, well presented. There’s a couple of jokey judges (who I again have never heard of) to shake their heads in wonderment at the inability of the “celebrity in the street” to actually cook something appetizing. […]
READ MOREFinally, and I mean FINALLY, I’ve uploaded my old Data Structures Library for Delphi (EZDSL) to GitHub. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while, and now it’s there and you can download it, issue pull requests, the whole nine yards. I also updated it for the Delphi XE series (the last time I ‘officially’ updated it was for Delphi 2009). It includes linked lists (single and double), queues, deques, priority queues, binary trees, binary sort trees, a mildly-broken red-black tree, hash tables, skip lists, and a binary array. The type of data objects you can store are limited only by your imagination, but be warned, they’re just pointers in the interface and you’ll have to be adept at casting back and forth. […]
READ MOREOK, this is a weird one. Well over two years ago now, there was a Kickstarter for a watch. Not just any old watch, or even a smart watch, just the thinnest one in the world. It’s 0.8mm thin, or, for you non-metric types, 0.00315 inches. All it does is tell the time. So, I plonked down my $99 as one of the original backers and pretty much forgot about it, as I do with anything I back on Kickstarter. […]
READ MOREOK: here’s the scenario. You’ve just loaded a long text-heavy web page on your iPhone or iPad and want to search through it for a particular word or phrase. How do you do it? […]
READ MOREOnce I’d resolved the Surface Pro 3 had to go, I had to decide what to replace it with. I’ve had a Dell XPS 12 for two years now and love it, apart from one drawback. It’s heavier than a “normal” touch ultrabook because of the swivel screen (it needs a sturdy frame). My wife has been using one of the original XPS 13s for three years and it’s wonderfully light, and I bought her one of the new ones with the “Infinity display” earlier this year to replace it. I’d have to say it’s a beautiful machine: the display is crisp and clear and extends to the edge of the screen. Bloody marvelous. […]
READ MOREIn February, I decided to buy and try out a Surface Pro 3. I’d read reviews such as Hanselman’s where he recounted using one for a couple of months and liking it, and it seemed to me that it was possibly a good replacement to my nearly two-year-old Dell XPS 12. The one primary reason for upgrading was DevExpress’ release of their grid for Xamarin.Forms: I’d bought a MacBook Air 11 for demoing that on travels, and I needed a lighter ultrabook to demo everything else we do. (And before someone pipes up and says, buy a MacBook Pro, been there, done that, moved on. Also I need a touch screen, so there.) The Air is 2.2 lbs, the XPS 12 is 3.3 lbs, so a chunky 5.5 lbs to lug around at conferences and to the booth. Meh, to put it bluntly. The Surface Pro 3 with Type Cover, on the other hand, was 2.44 lbs: OK that’s more like it. […]
READ MOREYesterday was an anniversary in the Bucknall household. It marked nine years since I joined DevExpress as their CTO. It was on the Ides of March, 2006 that I started this life of a remote employee – I live in Colorado, DevExpress was in Vegas and is now in Glendale, CA – and I must admit it’s been fairly successful, at least on my side. What can I say about the last nine years from that personal viewpoint? […]
READ MOREThis evening I wanted to solve a particular problem, and it required me – or so I thought – to permute an array of items. Back in the day I wrote an article for PCPlus on the subject and mentioned in there Heap’s algorithm. I hasten to add here that “Heap” here is not the traditional computer science heap, or even the application memory heap, but B.R. Heap, who first formulated and published this algorithm in 1963 (pdf). […]
READ MORESo yesterday I wrote an article about the conditional support of MathJax in my posts here on the blog. The post required MathJax since I deliberately put an equation in it. Today I noticed that viewing that post in Chrome led to the equation being rendered three times across the page: […]
READ MOREA couple of years ago I did a series of posts about TVM, the Time Value of Money (1, 2, 3). Because they were mathematical in nature, I had to write a few math expressions and equations. Way back when I’d have written them out in the Equation Editor in Word, and taken screenshots, but this time I decided to go for a browser-based solution: MathJax. In essence, I’d write the expressions in LaTeX format, such as x = \frac {-b \pm \sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}} {2a}, and have it rendered as: […]