Comment spam defeated at last

For years when running this blog, I would have to log in each day and delete a dozen comments due to spam. This was a chore, and I tried many ways to stem the tide.

0, 1, Many, a Zillion

It's common wisdom that there should only be three numbers in source code. But there's actually four. Here's why.

How a programmer reads your resume (comic)

People thought it was a comic, so I never corrected them.

Blame the extensions (comic)

Finding great ideas for your startup

"I just don't have any ideas." This is the #1 stumbling block for budding entrepreneurs. Here are a few techniques to get the creative juices flowing.

A simple command line calculator

A textbook example of recursive descent parsing.

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.

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.

Experiment: Deleting a post from the Internet

Once you post something on the Internet, it is hard to get rid of it. As an experiment, I deleted one of my past posts, and I tried to remove all traces of it.

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