Channel 9 - Discussions by jsampsonPC

Coffeehouse - Brilliant Code! Got Some?

jsampsonPC — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 22:19:44 GMT

Just found this one online:

#include

typedef struct {
    int ch;
    int count;
} star_t;

int main(void) {
    star_t foo[] = {
{46, 22}, {47, 1}, {194, 1}, {180, 1}, {194, 1}, {175, 1}, {47, 1}, {41, 1}, {'\n', 1},
{46, 20}, {44, 1}, {47, 1}, {194, 1}, {175, 1}, {46, 2}, {47, 1}, {'\n', 1},
{46, 19}, {47, 1}, {46, 4}, {47, 1}, {'\n', 1},
{46, 13}, {47, 1}, {194, 1}, {180, 1}, {194, 1}, {175, 1}, {47, 1}, {39, 1}, {46, 3}, {39, 1}, {47, 1}, {194, 1}, {180, 1}, {194, 1}, {175, 1}, {194, 1}, {175, 1}, {96, 1}, {194, 1}, {183, 1}, {194, 1}, {184, 1}, {'\n', 1},
{46, 10}, {47, 1}, {39, 1}, {47, 1}, {46, 3}, {47, 1}, {46, 4}, {47, 1}, {46, 7}, {47, 1}, {194, 1}, {168, 1}, {194, 1}, {175, 1}, {92, 1}, {'\n', 1},
{46, 8}, {40, 1}, {39, 1}, {40, 1}, {46, 3}, {194, 1}, {180, 1}, {46, 3}, {194, 1}, {180, 1}, {46, 4}, {32, 1}, {194, 1}, {175, 1}, {126, 1}, {47, 1}, {39, 1}, {46, 3}, {39, 1}, {41, 1}, {'\n', 1},
{46, 9}, {92, 1}, {46, 17}, {39, 1}, {46, 5}, {47, 1}, {'\n', 1},
{46, 10}, {39, 2}, {46, 3}, {92, 1}, {46, 10}, {32, 1}, {95, 1}, {46, 1}, {194, 1}, {183, 1}, {194, 1}, {180, 1}, {'\n', 1},
{46, 12}, {92, 1}, {46, 14}, {40, 1}, {'\n', 1},
{46, 14}, {92, 1}, {46, 13}, {92, 1}, {46, 1}, {32, 1}, {'\n', 1}
    };
    int i, j;
    for (i = 0; i < sizeof(foo) / sizeof(foo[0]); i++) {
        star_t bar = foo[i];
        for (j = 0; j < bar.count; j++) {
            printf("%c", (char )bar.ch);
        }
    }
    return 0;
}

Coffeehouse - Brilliant Code! Got Some?

jsampsonPC — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 20:31:55 GMT

W3bbo said:
I executed the PHP... it's just a list of days, clicking on a link doesn't actually do anything other than reload the page.

This is under PHP5 though. Does your script make use of any PHP4-specific behaviour?

It's not suppose to do anything other than list days. Something that could have been done like this:

$list = "";
for ($i = 0; $i < date('t"); $i++) {
$list .= "Day {$i}, ";
}
print $list;

As for any PHP4-Specific behaviour, not sure. I think all of the code is ambiguous. No PHP OO activity or anything. No usage of $_SESSION...I think it's all cross-compat with 4 and 5

Somebody actually wanted a solution over at DevShed. They wanted links for days 1 - n of the current month. This was a joke-solution (although a functional one) for their problem. I thought it was funny

I was mostly curious if anybody here had every done anything similar as a joke.

Coffeehouse - Brilliant Code! Got Some?

jsampsonPC — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:41:48 GMT

"Billiant" is sarcastic - the code here is less-than-brilliant...far less than brilliant.

I wrote the following up as a joke to a friend. Curious if you .NET guys have ever written your own jokes?

The following code prints a link for each day of the current month: Day 1, Day 2, etc. The links direct you to another page that can do something with the query string...Enjoy.

(Oh, and yes, this IS a joke - so no flaming )

    getDays();

    function getDays() {
        $day = array("1","2","3","4","5","6","7","8","9","10","11","12","13",
                    "14","15","16","17","18","19","20","21","22","23","24",
                    "25","26","27","28","29","30","31");
        $trueDays = array();
        $arrayLinks = array();

        for($i = 0; $i < count($day); $i++) {
            if ($i < date("t") && $i > 0) {
                if (is_numeric($i)) {
                    $trueDays[] = ($day[$i] > 0) ? $day[$i] : 0 ;
                }
            }
        }
        if (is_array($trueDays) && 1 == 1) {
            $dayString = implode(",",$trueDays);
        }
        if (strlen($dayString) > 0) {
            foreach ($trueDays as $day) {
                $arrayLinks[] = "Day {$day}";
            }
        }

        print "Day 1, " . implode(", ",$arrayLinks);
    }

?>

Coffeehouse - IE White-space rendering sucks...

jsampsonPC — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 01:44:50 GMT

turrican said:

Yepp..

But hm... unless you need to use IE6, perhaps it is time to ditch the TABLE. The road was very hard for me, but I am very happy that I did ditch the TABLE now, no more mess! =)

Turrican,

I don't do table-based layouts if that is what you're suggesting. I'm strictly div-based with a strict doctype exclusive. The table in this thread (now 2 years ago) was for representing tabular data.

Jonathan

Coffeehouse - I can haz my liveid, plz?

jsampsonPC — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:11:41 GMT

Ceiling kitteh is sad, because when this account (jsampsonpc) was inaccessible, I had to use my liveid. Now that I have this account back, I can't use my liveid, because it's associated to (jonathan sampson) account.

Can haz delete FROM users WHERE user_name = "jonathansampson"

Coffeehouse - Olympics, lol

jsampsonPC — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:08:19 GMT

brian.shapiro said:
London will have to do better in 2012, W3bbo

...but the world ends in 2012...Did London take this into consideration when they decided to host the games?

Coffeehouse - IE White-space rendering sucks...

jsampsonPC — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 21:02:14 GMT

stevo_ said:

ScottWFB said:

*snip*

display: block usually works.. but if not, use floating.. its not just an IE thing either..

I don't recall ever experiencing this issue with anything but IE.

@ ScottWFB, no, I've found no solution. I haven't really noticed it lately though in IE7 - but that doesn't mean it won't creep up on me sometime in the future.

Tech Off - New Robot Order on Earth

jsampsonPC — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:21:23 GMT

Link is wrong : http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080401.html

Coffeehouse - Something you learned in the last 3 months from Ch9?

jsampsonPC — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 18:56:25 GMT

I invoke THREAD.RESURRECTION();!

It's been almost 2 years, and nobody has learned anything? Let me be the first to start.

Last week, W3bbo helped me solve a problem relating to Storing Markup in Data-fields. He introduced me to Markdown, a great way to keep your content clean, and convert it to HTML upon displaying.

Now my database is getting cleaner and cleaner, and I even have my wife working on converting the rest of it, as a testimony to how easy it is to format your data with markdown - even my non-coding wife can do it.

Thanks W3bbo

Tech Off - Storing text for online article database...

jsampsonPC — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 00:20:53 GMT

figuerres wrote:

Just read a bit about it and it sounds GREAT!

It is, completely. I used the PHP version, and it's nothing morethan calling the Markdown($source) function. It's so easy to use too. I am actually hiring my wife (who knows next to nothing about HTML/CSS) to come in and reformat the article database for me while I continue coding.

Tech Off - Storing text for online article database...

jsampsonPC — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 23:52:44 GMT

ZippyV wrote:

jh71283 wrote:
What about compressing the html that you're storing?

would that do the trick?

How would that solve his problem?

I'm not looking for compression so much as covenience. I want to get away from mixed-data, and stick with some a bit more pleasing to the eyes and expandable.

Markdown is extremely great, and seems to solve all of my problems while keeping the text completely readable.

Markdown + Clean CSS, that is.

Tech Off - Subscribing to an RSS feed on the local network

jsampsonPC — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 18:23:04 GMT

Maybe you could trick IE with some clever host-file manipulation?

Tech Off - Storing text for online article database...

jsampsonPC — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:24:12 GMT

W3bbo wrote:

Markdown.

Oh looky-there...this is neat.

Thanks W3bbo.

Tech Off - Storing text for online article database...

jsampsonPC — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 21:17:56 GMT

Strip out markup? I don't want to do that. I'm asking this: if it's wrong to have markup in your data-field, then how do you apply formatting for articles that need it.

...or maybe it's not wrong at all to do basic HTML in the data-field, such as P, STRONG, U, EM, BLOCKQUOTE, etc... any input guys?

Tech Off - Where do you store single pieces of information?

jsampsonPC — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 20:29:59 GMT

In the past I've had to do some things like this for small client sites. I wanted to give them the ability to change "the front page paragraph", "the about us column", and "our slogans on different pages."

Of course I wouldn't learn of this until things were pretty much finished being developed, so I went with a simple two-column table:

location
text

Examples:

frontPageParagraph | Hello World
aboutUsColumn | Hello World Again
totalMembers | 2878
websiteCreatedDate | 2008-01-01

That way I could simply "SELECT text FROM oneLiners WHERE location = 'frontPageParagraph'".

Again, probably not very elegant, but it worked. Like a previous niner said too, any solution of this type won't give you history, so you could simply toss in an isActive field of type bool, and rather than updating the text field, just insert a new record and give it the exclusive isActive value of True.

Then it's merely "SELECT text FROM oneLiners WHERE (location = 'frontPageParagraph') AND (isActive = true)"

Take it with a grain of salt

Tech Off - Storing text for online article database...

jsampsonPC — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 19:55:47 GMT

Hey Niners,

I'm working on an article database right now, and have introduced a bit of frustration into my day when I decided to offer the web-article as on-the-fly PDF's too.

The article were all stored in the database as HTML. It's ugly, trust me. So I'm deciding what I want to do with them. The HTML is all wrong also, so I do have to go through and do some clean up regardless.

But I recall being told in the past that articles should never contain ANY markup or css, but if that is the case, how would you write ²³⁸Pa without using the SUP tag?

Just curious how you guys would design an article database beyond simply making a field for the title, author and text

Tech Off - "Searching 'Samson'......did you mean 'Sampson'?"

jsampsonPC — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 14:49:24 GMT

I'm about to start writing a small search engine within my site and I'm wanting to get more into assisting the user in finding the results they want.

I have considered soundex() operations, but heard that they aren't always reliable, since longer more complex soundex() results may be truncated.

I've also looked into Levenshtein Distance, but again have problems. Seems like to get a search-engine to find suggestions based upon their levenshtein-distance from the original search-term, you need to have a list of terms waiting to be compared to everybody's search term, and that could be nasty on the server forcing a levenshtein equation 1,000+ times everytime somebody submits a search.

Even if you do the tiresome lookups, you'll get dozens of alternatives for each word - how do you decide which to suggest? Seems almost like I need to store search terms, and the number of their returned results in the database, and do levenshtein-comparisons against those, and sort the close ones by their number of last returned results...make sense?

So I humble myself and come before you all today anybody know how to do this in an efficient way?

Coffeehouse - It' Time to To clarify the situation Windows 7

jsampsonPC — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 19:58:34 GMT

AndyC wrote:

PaoloM wrote:

Blue pearl = Windows Vista
White pearl = Windows Live
Green pearl = Media Center

Black pearl = Pirates!

Black Velvet!

Coffeehouse - It' Time to To clarify the situation Windows 7

jsampsonPC — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:05:53 GMT

Charles wrote:

jsampsonPC wrote:

Charles wrote:
What is the obsession lately with Windows 7? How many of you actually run Vista?

C

I run Vista on three machines, and XP on one. I love Vista. My fascination with Windows 7 is, it's Windows 7...why else wouldn't I be fascinated with it?

That's like asking doctors why they would be fascinated in the next generation of medical instruments and devices Or what your question simply rhetorical?

Well, no. Obsession is not the same thing as being curious and genuinely very interested. Obsession implies that it's all you think about, you know, obsessively

Ah, I didn't now you were being literal with "obsession" I'm not necessarily "obsessed". But yeah, interested and curious Besides, if it keeps people talking about UX, and ideas, then that is cool

Coffeehouse - It' Time to To clarify the situation Windows 7

jsampsonPC — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:01:06 GMT

Charles wrote:
What is the obsession lately with Windows 7? How many of you actually run Vista?

C

I run Vista on three machines, and XP on one. I love Vista. My fascination with Windows 7 is, it's Windows 7...why else wouldn't I be fascinated with it?

That's like asking doctors why they would be fascinated in the next generation of medical instruments and devices Or what your question simply rhetorical?

Coffeehouse - Bigfoot on Mars?

jsampsonPC — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:45:52 GMT

It wasn't as amazing as the zoomed-out view of the mountain-side just behind this figure (I couldn't resist ):

I guess the rednecks are already up there looking for Bigfoot, trying to get that reward!

Coffeehouse - 3d on the brain..

jsampsonPC — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 16:02:37 GMT

Maddus Mattus wrote:

AndyC wrote:

jamie wrote:
*note - a scroll wheel mouse is as mandatory as a monitor

Tablet PC's don't have a scroll wheel. Neither do most laptops come to think of it.

Most laptops have somesort of shock detector, maybe you can use it to read the tilt instead of using a mouse wheel?

If it's a tablet PC, why not just use the Stylus? Drag right to scroll right, drag up and down to zoom in/out?

Coffeehouse - Scientology Website Hacked

jsampsonPC — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 05:28:49 GMT

ScanIAm wrote:
...I have to say that the most entertaining part of the whole thread was this little ditty:

jsampsonPC wrote:

Ignore him, he's an idiot. When I calmly defended Christianity here in the Atheist Quotes Thread, he went on a tirade about Religion. When all is calm, he takes the iniative to start even more religious discussions - he's a moron.

Followed, quickly, by:

jsampsonPC wrote:

Romans 12:14,18
Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.

Ah...I guess all is forgiven.

Conveniently hypocritical peace be unto you, broham.

How is it hypocritical? Am I not entitled to my opinion? Where in my statements did I curse you? I offered my reasoning. I didn't just blast you out of nowhere. You're inconsistent, and childish. It's this type of response from you that further convinces me that you are indeed an idiot. I mean that in the sincerest way possible.

id·i·ot /ˈɪdiət/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[id-ee-uht]–noun
1.    an utterly foolish or senseless person.
2.    Psychology. a person of the lowest order in a former classification of mental retardation, having a mental age of less than three years old and an intelligence quotient under 25.

mo·ron /ˈmɔrɒn, ˈmoʊr-/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[mawr-on, mohr-] –noun
1.    a person who is notably stupid or lacking in good judgment.
2.    Psychology. a person of borderline intelligence in a former classification of mental retardation, having an intelligence quotient of 50 to 69.

As I said before

jsampsonpc wrote:
When I calmly defended Christianity here in the Atheist Quotes Thread, he went on a tirade about Religion. When all is calm, he takes the iniative to start even more religious discussions

How is that cursing you?

curse      /kɜrs/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[kurs] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation noun, verb, cursed or curst, curs·ing.
–noun
1.    the expression of a wish that misfortune, evil, doom, etc., befall a person, group, etc.
2.    a formula or charm intended to cause such misfortune to another.
3.    the act of reciting such a formula.
4.    a profane oath; curse word.
5.    an evil that has been invoked upon one.
6.    the cause of evil, misfortune, or trouble.
7.    something accursed.
8.    Slang. the menstrual period; menstruation (usually prec. by the).
9.    an ecclesiastical censure or anathema.
–verb (used with object)
10.    to wish or invoke evil, calamity, injury, or destruction upon.
11.    to swear at.
12.    to blaspheme.
13.    to afflict with great evil.
14.    to excommunicate.
–verb (used without object)
15.    to utter curses; swear profanely.

Coffeehouse - It's All Relative

jsampsonPC — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:51:42 GMT

Soviut wrote:
Incest is relative.

It's absolutely relative!

Coffeehouse - It's All Relative

jsampsonPC — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 20:43:59 GMT

evildictaitor wrote:

jsampsonPC wrote:

Who's to say there aren't mediums that we simply cannot detect yet with today's technology. We've been doing this cat and mouse thing for a while. Make an observation, it's crazy insane, can't figure it out, learn something new, it makes more sense, and some day it's just taken for granted. Or, we make an observation, try to understand it within the current knowledge-base of Science, and find out 10 years later that we were completely wrong.

...But this conversation is tetering ever so close to the divide of where even theoretical physists start rechecking their assumptions, so let's get back to the newtonian world.

Aww, fine. It was gettin' good though