Rubik’s championships

Well I am sorry to say I couldn’t attend the Rubik’s cube speedcubing world championships in Hungary this year. Another thing I missed this year was Erik Akkersdijk’ new world record of 9.77 set during the Dutch Open. I didn’t even know he was this good. Congratz, also to all the other ones performing so well, as e.g. Dan with his 10.xx solve.

I am practicing more than before because it gets me really excited to see everyone master the craft/art/sport so well. The last couple of days I get regular sub 15s solves, while I am still trying to get a 12 x sub 20.

I am thinking of practicing the OLL and PLL attack a little more, I think that will help.

Find out when new software releases come out

• Update notifications for your software
  Find out when new releases come out. I have no idea how well th is works, but I’ll let you know soon. Apparently they have 80,000 apps listed.
  (tags: software update notifications new releases applications)
  Update on this update about updates: I have to give this app 2 stars, but only for actually showing me the status of my apps. I have to do the downloading myself because the ‘automatic’ updating hardly ever works.

How to find the length of a string

Just out of being bored I decided to share some really basic source code. Here’s how to find the lenght of a text in my three favorite languages:

PHP

$s = "simple php programming";
$length = strlen($s);

JavaScript

var s = "simple javascript programming";
var length = s.length;

(Visual) Basic

dim s as string
dim length as integer

s = "simple basic programming";
length = len(s);

Funniest writing in lolcat

OK, I must admit, I must be getting old. I didn’t even know what LOLCAT meant. But usually I can has pickup new stuv really fazt. So now I know what Jasmine meant with her post on ICanHasCheeseBurger.

So here’s the bible in LOLCAT (or at least a part of it)

Just when I thought that couldn’t be topped, I read about LOLCODE, programming in this weird language:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "Hello world!"
KTHXBYE

It made me think of Microsoft’s Yoda language LINQ, but of course Microsoft doesn’t have a sense of humor.

NFB is not so blind friendly itself

The web standards project writes: 

“Yesterday, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California certified the NFB lawsuit against Target as a class action on behalf of blind Internet users throughout the U.S. and ruled that websites like Target.com are required, under California state law, to be accessible.

In February of 2006, the National Federation of the Blind took legal action against Target for having an inaccessible website. A month later the case after it went to federal court (at Target’s request), and in September, the NFB began pushing for class action certification after Target failed to get the case thrown out.”

This is strange. I just looked at the NFB site and it doesn’t look accessible at all. I looked at it without style sheets and that is not the list-item look you’d expect. Also it fails a simple WAI check. Maybe the most disturbing is the use of light blue on orange!

However, of course I support the NFB in it’s goal of making the web accessible to everyone.

How to solve any problem

• How to solve any problem
  This book can tell you how to methodically solve any problem (except for an argument with a women, that cannot be solved). Very useful for programmers. The summary here solves the problem of not having the time to read the book.
  (tags: reference math problem puzzles solving logic howto)