C++: A language for next generation web apps

On Monday, I was pleased to be an uninvited speaker at Waterloo Devhouse, hosted in Postrank's magnificent office. After making some surreptitious alterations to their agile development wall, I gave a tongue-in-cheek talk on how C++ can fit in to a web application.

When programmers design web sites (comic)

Why Perforce is more scalable than Git

Branching on Perforce is kind of like performing open heart surgery. But here's why git can't hope to compete with it.

Boring Date (comic)

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.

A Rhyming Engine

Here's a rhyming engine, written in 1000 lines of C++ code. It uses the freely available Moby dictionary, and full source code is provided.

Draw waveforms and hear them

A while back I thought it would be interesting to be able to draw arbitrary waveforms and then listen to how they sound. I had an audio engine just laying around, so I whipped up a quick application to do that.

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

Automatically remove wordiness from your writing

How QBASIC almost got me killed

The day arrived when my project was ready to be unleashed upon the world. I waited until the teacher was hovering nearby and then I started my application, running the FORMAT command on the network drive. Some classmates were watching the screen and she hurried over to see what all the fuss was about.