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?

The Curious Complexity of Being Turned On

In software, the simplest things can turn into a nightmare, especially at a large company.

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.

Using the Acer Aspire One as a web server

A netbook can be ideal for a home web server. They are cheap, and use less power than a CFL light bulb.

Copy a cairo surface to the windows clipboard

I just spent several hours debugging clipboard copy of a DIB image. I could copy from my application, and paste into Paint. I could paste into Word. But if I pasted into WordPad, nothing showed up. If I pasted into GIMP, it crashed.

Throw away the keys: Easy, Minimal Perfect Hashing

Perfect hashing is a technique for building a hash table with no collisions in the minimum possible space. They are a easy to build with this simple python function.

Let's read a Truetype font file from scratch

Walkthough of reading and interpretting a TrueType font file in a few lines of Javascript.

"Your program is stupid. It doesn't work," my wife told me

I found Security Vulnerability in your web application

Cell Phone Secrets

How to choose a cell phone in 2006, if you want the best possible radio.