http://blog.shimpossible.com It's not impossible, it's ShimPossible Sun, 16 Aug 2009 13:08:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Everyone wants faster, simpler code.  "Optimization" doesn't mean the same thing to everyone though.  For example a FSM.  This usually start out as a big mass of very simple states.  You then "optimize" redundant and nop states away, and combine states.  For example a simple FSM for most console games Logos ... http://blog.shimpossible.com/2009/08/16/legos_and_optimization/ Python allows you to assign almost everything.  There doesn't seem to be a difference between variables and functions.  You can have a class Foo with attributes bar and baz. These can be methods or plain varaibles, and you can re assign them at run time.   So Foo.bar = 10  and ... http://blog.shimpossible.com/2009/04/17/python-like-net/ Using dates and times in a program is not always as straight forward as you might think.  The issue is with timezones and daylight savings.  Most people forget to use a timezone when they store dates.  This might not seem like an issue if you think your program will never ... http://blog.shimpossible.com/2009/04/09/fun-with-timezones/ When swapping variables most people use tmp = a a = b b = tmp This requires using an extra variable tmp to store A while it is overwritten with b.  Wouldn't it be great if you could swap the two without using an extra variable?  The XOR swap algorithm is just what you ... http://blog.shimpossible.com/2009/01/27/swap-with-out-the-tmp/ Here's a small utility i wrote after having to keep adding the same command lines arguments to a java. This program is a wrapper around the one you want to launch. You can specify a prefix and a postfix to the arguments. You can ... http://blog.shimpossible.com/2007/09/02/launch-wrapper/ I bought an Acer laptop last year. It seemed like a pretty good deal at the time. It was 1000$ cheaper than other. Though, I seemed to have got what I paid for. It promptly died in December, slightly before Christmas. ... http://blog.shimpossible.com/2007/07/18/white-screen-of-death/ I have been working on a project in Adobe flash for the last few months. It basically does a ton of animation and math on every screen. So i put all the code in onEnterFrame, the standard way to run continuous code, so it ran on each frame. ... http://blog.shimpossible.com/2007/05/02/faster-flash/ I'm sure you have all heard about the problems with certain mp3 players and their 'random' play lists. Some people think they repeat some songs more than others. Well here a way to get a truly random shuffle of the list in constant time. That means it ... http://blog.shimpossible.com/2007/01/13/non-repeat-random-playlist-in-constant-time/ I ran across a wonderful article a while ago about a Combination / Permutation class that generated them as a stream.  It's a great idea.  It makes unit testing pretty easy, as you can have the class make sure you hit all your test cases.  Sadly I wasn't able to ... http://blog.shimpossible.com/2006/12/23/combination-generation/ Given a set of n jugs of different sizes, how would you dump water between them to get a specific amount? If you have ever watched Diehard III, you might have seen this with 2 jugs. In the movie they are given 4 and 5 ... http://blog.shimpossible.com/2006/11/09/n-jugs/