Countdown to PDC2008: Technical Fellow John Shewchuk Talks About His Talk at PDC2008

Posted By: Dan Fernandez | Sep 11th, 2008 @ 6:04 PM | 59,848 Views | 13 Comments
Technical Fellow, and longtime PDC veteran, John Shewchuk join Mike and Jennifer to talk about his session at PDC.  What’s the scoop?  He’s going to explain how easy it is to take your apps, using Microsoft’s collection of services, to make them better and easier to build than ever.  What’s that you say?  Listen as John shows his glee for this year’s PDC as we usher in the next generation computing platform!  Are you really going to miss out on this event?  Plus, after lots of begging and pleading, Mike let’s Jennifer deliver this week’s Hard Hat Challenge as Liberace listens in. 
Tag: PDC08
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#Sep 15th, 2008 @ 1:59 AM
Sokol
Sokol
Let me guess... Olympics in Los Angeles (1984)? Smiley No, Fridjon, thanks for the tip, but I'm out. My kitchen timer rang up a couple of hours ago Smiley Smiley Smiley
#Sep 22nd, 2008 @ 1:13 PM
Captain JiNX
Captain JiNX
J i N X
I asked the brain about XYZZY, and...

Brianna says:
A hollow voice says "PDC."

Tongue Out

#Sep 22nd, 2008 @ 4:03 PM
mswanson
mswanson
And we have ourselves a winner! Congratulations, Captain JiNX! Awesome job. Drop us an e-mail at pdccount (at) microsoft.com, and we'll coordinate your limited edition PDC2008 t-shirt.

As with prior challenges, I'd love to hear the thinking process behind your solution, if you want to share it. Smiley
#Sep 23rd, 2008 @ 12:08 AM
Captain JiNX
Captain JiNX
J i N X
-----------------SPOILER--------------------











Actually, I saw the challenge yesterday morning for the first time. I read the nice clues above fromFridjon (Thanks btw...), and I immediately associated everything to the good old Amiga-days, when we used to make demos with nice vector graphics in them... These numbers just had to be vectors. I figured that the groups of four numbers must be "Distance" (the length of the vector), a "Point" (X and Y coords) and "Direction" (the angle). The problem was just which number was what? The last number was the only one in each group that was larger than 0, so that had to be the length. The third number spanned from negative to positive numbers, so I guessed that had to be the angle. That left the coordinates to number one and two.
Then I created a small C# program that would draw all these vectors (using what's left of my old trigonometry knowledge from the scene). Of course nothing showed up... But then I thought about "the wrong direction", so I animated a rotation on every vector, and after some "trial and horror" a text magically appeared in front of me... "ASK THE BRAIN ABOUT XYZZY". So I did... Smiley
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