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Thursday, May 28, 2009 5:15 PM

Stack overflow, expand your stack? Change your algorithm!

In the last post, Area fill algorithm: crayons and coloring book , I showed a program that emulates a kid drawing in a coloring book. However, the algorithm wasn’t very efficient, and would explode even if you had a simple drawing: it was using the stack
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 1 Comments
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Saturday, February 28, 2009 1:48 AM

Unorthodox chopsticks

Several years ago, my wife and I were walking through a local shopping mall. At the time, there was some sort of Asian festival. At a display booth there was a table upon which were two trays, side by side. One was empty, and the other had many beans.
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 7 Comments
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Thursday, January 29, 2009 12:16 PM

Cartoon animation program

A cartoon can be thought of as a series of drawings. To simulate movement, the drawings can be slightly different from each other. Remember drawing simple cartoons using a pad of paper? Simply flipping through the pages made the drawings come to life.
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 15 Comments
Friday, June 06, 2008 12:36 PM

Use a dictionary to help create a mnemonic

I was using a program that was yet another TLA and I wanted to create a mnemonic to help me remember what it was. One of the letters was “k”, so I wanted to find a word that starts with “k” Simple: load a dictionary, search for words starting with “k”
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 2 Comments
Monday, October 09, 2006 12:26 PM

Write your own hangman game

Many years ago (1985) I wrote a C program to play Hangman. I had decoded a word processor spelling dictionary for my word source. More recently, I have encoded 2 spelling dictionaries for general purpose use: 1 with 171201 words, the other with 53869.
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 7 Comments
Thursday, September 14, 2006 11:12 AM

The Nametag Game

When I took my 3 year old son for the first day of preschool, there was a table with several nametags for the students. I asked him if he knew which one was his, and he correctly pointed out the right one. Below is sample code in Fox and VB.net that is
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 6 Comments
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Monday, January 23, 2006 10:40 AM

Create your own typing tutor!

Here’s an idea to teach somebody the positions of the letters on the keyboard: letters fly in randomly from the right for 30 seconds. Hit the letter on the keyboard for points. Miss and lose points. As time goes on, the letters move faster and there are
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 21 Comments
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Thursday, January 19, 2006 9:55 AM

Carburetor is a car part, but prosecutable is not

My wife and I like to listen to PuzzleMaster Will Shortz.on NPR. This week’s challenge is from one of my favorite puzzle makers Merl Reagle : Take the word carburetor, add two letters and rearrange the result to name another car part. And the answer is
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 6 Comments
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Monday, January 16, 2006 10:16 AM

A Discounter Introduces Reductions: Multiple Anagrams

Many moons ago, I was playing with spelling dictionaries (see What is an index anyway? ) and anagrams. After decoding a spelling dictionary for a word data base in the early 1980s, I wrote some word games, like scrabble and anagrams. APT, PAT, and TAP
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 18 Comments
Tuesday, January 10, 2006 9:33 AM

Create your own Word Search puzzles

I wrote a Word Search generating program in C++ (308 lines) years ago: my brother used it to generate a puzzle including all the girls in his 8 th grade class, which was 22 years ago: about 1984 (sounds Orwellian<g>). I wrote one in C# (456 lines)
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 27 Comments
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Thursday, August 18, 2005 10:23 AM

The mechanics of Sudoku

The rules of Sudoku are so simple (see Sudoku puzzles screen capture ) that it seems easy to write the mechanics of the puzzle in Fox. It took 20 minutes to write this. Move the mouse over a desired square and type a digit key. ‘0’ means erase what’s
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 8 Comments
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Wednesday, August 17, 2005 10:50 AM

Sudoku puzzles screen capture

I love doing crossword puzzles: I’m a huge fan of Merle Reagle (I have all his books www.sundaycrosswords.com ) and I love the NY Times Sunday puzzles, both of which come in the Seattle Times. We also love listening to the NPR Sunday Puzzle by Puzzlemaster
Posted by Calvin_Hsia | 17 Comments
 
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