i am looking for a specific data structure, but i forgot its name. if i knew the name it would be trivial, i would just look it up in wikipedia :) basically, it is like a set - except you cannot iterate it. you put some values in it, lets say 80k zip codes. then you can test if a given string is definately NOT a zip code, but you will...
This is so vague it's ridiculous but who knows... We have got this client who will not budge - they are supplying PDF files auto generated by their own software. These files don't import into our (printing) lab management software - made by kodak. So I emailed Kodak the error log and relevant files and got this back.. DP2 supports th...
I have a system that requires a unique 6-digit code to represent an object, and I'm trying to think of a good algorithm for generating them. Here are the pre-reqs: I'm using a base-20 system (no caps, numbers, vowels, or l to prevent confusion and naughty words) The base-20 allows 64 million combinations I'll be inserting potentially...
Many users and forum programs in attempt to make automatic e-mail address harversting harder conseal them via obfuscation - @ is replaced with "at" and . is replaced with "dot", so [email protected] now becomes team at stackoverflow dot com I'm not an expert in regular expressions and I'm really curious - does such obfuscatio...
"Dead reckoning is the process of estimating one's current position based upon a previously determined position and advancing that position based upon known or estimated speeds over elapsed time, and course." (Wikipedia) I'm currently implementing a simple server that makes use of dead reckoning optimization, which minimizes the upd...
I am a PHP developer, and I often have no idea in terms of days--let alone hours--how long something will take me at work. I am often writing new stuff, merging it with old legacy crap. I can tell my boss what week I will likely have something done--and maybe what half of what week--but I how in the world am I to know specifically what d...
I'm looking for an algorithm to solve the following in a reasonable amount of time. Given a set of sets, find all such sets that are subsets of a given set. For example, if you have a set of search terms like ["stack overflow", "foo bar", ...], then given a document D, find all search terms whose words all appear in D. I have found tw...
I have been using AOP for "classic" things like logging and security for a while and am starting to take it further. One problem I come across frequently with desktop applications is the need to store user-specific data locally. To that end, I have built a component that works well for me that stores data as XML in an application-speci...
Goal Let me start with my final vision of what I'd like to be able to do first: In Windows, I'd like to be able to use a global keyboard shortcut that I define (say, Ctrl+Alt+C) to copy the full path and filename of the open document in the foreground application to the clipboard. This would be useful to, for example, be able to subs...
I need to quickly save a re-ordered sequence back to my items' integer sortOrder columns. The simple renumber-by-one approach can be slow - if last item moved to first, all N rows are modified. A multi-row update statement would let database do the work, but I'd like to explore smarter ways, like making sortOrder floating point except...
Okay, here's the situation: We have a table of about 50 columns (created by joining database tables) and several thousand rows. We need to identify a pattern in several known faulty records of that data. Here's a really boiled down example. Given a table: ----------------------- | id | title | date | ----------------------- | 01 | c ...
Hi, I often find myself changing my code to make it more testable, I always wonder whether this is a good idea or not. Some of the things I find myself doing are: Adding setters just so I can set an internal object to a mock. Adding getters for internal maps/lists so I can check the internal state of the object has changed after perf...
Upon reaching a brick wall with the .Net framework's lack of a BigInteger class (yet), I've decided I'd like to develop my own as an exercise (I realize open source alternatives exist). What hoops do I need to jump through to be able to develop this? Is there any particuliar knowledge pieces that I probably wouldn't have? edit: side q...
This is one of those, " I wish I had listened better, retained more of my math class info..", questions. I did this with brute force, but I know there's a better more correct way of accomplishing this. Given a 4 x 4 array of stations, and 8 groups(a-h). How to fill the array with group pair combinations so each pair(ab, ba) occurs only ...
How can I calculate the average of a set of data while smoothing over any points that are outside the "norm". It's been a while since I had to do any real math, but I'm sure I learned this somewhere... Lets say I have 12 days of sales data on one item: 2,2,2,50,10,15,9,6,2,0,2,1 I would like to calculate the average sales per day with...
It would be nice to have a more or less complete list over what files and/or directories that shouldn't (in most cases) be under source control. What do you think should be excluded? Suggestion so far: In general Config files with sensitive information (passwords, private keys etc.) Thumbs.db, .DS_Store and desktop.ini Editor backup...
I had to do a overview for a customer meeting, and they requested flow charts. It had never occurred to me that there was no switch symbol in any of the flow charting I've seen. I know functionally they are similar, but documentation should represent the code you've written or are planning too. Maybe I'm just being picky, but it seem...
I know the rule of thumb is that a noun used by the user is potentially a class. Similarly, a verb may be made into an action class e.g. predicate Given a description from the user, how do you - identify what is not not to be made into a class ...
(I know what null is and what its is used for) Question: OK, say we make a reference to an object in whatever language. The computer makes a little 32-bit (or other size, depending on computer's design) space in memory for that reference. That memory can be assigned to a value that represents an object's location in memory. But when I s...
I'm currently participating in a programming contest (http://contest.github.com), which has as goal, to create a recommendation engine. I started coding in ruby, but soon realised it wasn't fast enough for the algorithms I had in mind. So I switched to C, which is the only non-scripting language I know. It was fast, of course, but I crin...