Fast and Easy Levenshtein distance using a Trie

If you have a web site with a search function, you will rapidly realize that most mortals are terrible typists. Many searches contain mispelled words, and users will expect these searches to magically work. This magic is often done using levenshtein distance. In this article, I'll compare two ways of finding the closest matching word in a large dictionary. I'll describe how I use it on rhymebrain.com

Finding the top K items in a list efficiently

Do you use sort() to find the top results? Here's a simple trick that will make your software run much faster.

Finding awesome developers in programming interviews

In a job interview, I once asked a very experienced embedded software developer to write a program that reverses a string and prints it on the screen. He struggled with this basic task. This man was awesome. Give him a bucket of spare parts, and he could build a robot and program it to navigate around the room. He had worked on satellites that are now in actual orbit. He could have coded circles around me. But the one thing that he had never, ever needed to do was: display something on the screen.

I didn't know you could mix and match (comic)

barcamp (comic)

A Quick Measure of Sortedness

How do you measure the "sortedness" of a list? There are several ways. In the literature this measure is called the "distance to monotonicity" or the "measure of disorder" depending on who you read. Here, I propose another measure for sortedness.

Fun with Colour Difference

Are you looking for a nifty way to choose colours that stand out? Are you the type of person who is not satisfied until you have mathematically proven that your choice is optimal?

Why are all my lines fuzzy in cairo?

Make sure your lines are sharp using this simple trick.

Usability Nightmare: Xfce Settings Manager

Rant: Why can't anyone make a good settings screen?

I found Security Vulnerability in your web application