Everyone who works with large data sets in Google Maps has come across the problem of displaying a bunch of markers in a small area. Not just an eyesore, displaying anything more than a hundred marker icons at a time can bog the browser down on a lot of platforms, Safari on PPC Macs delivering […]
If you’re a del.icio.us power user and you use Windows Mobile, you’ve probably missed the del.icio.us plugin that’s available in desktop browsers like IE and Firefox. Dale Lane took this problem as a challenge and coded a nice little Pocket IE plugin that adds a del.icio.us submittal form to the browser’s menu. This is not […]
Following Poromenos’ nifty “Hello World!” function, Jan Krueger posted a great explanation for why it works along with a general method for producing a trigonometric function for _any_ string you like: The magic behind Poromenos’s function is the Fourier theorem: any “mostly” continuous and periodic function can be expressed as a sum of sines and […]
Nathan Harrington amended the GNOME Desktop Manager to include keystroke dynamics in the user verification process. When the user enters their username, the timings between key press events are measured and compared against a stored pattern. The theory is that there is a significant difference in timings for words typed by different individuals, so the […]
Mick West from Cowboy Programming posted a two part series to his blog titled Practical Fluid Dynamics. Originally written for Game Developer Magazine, it covers a number of clever (and down-to-earth) techniques for simulating the movement of fluids in games and other software environments where real-time speed and visual authenticity matter most. Special attention is […]
Take a peek at this curve. If you take the rounded y value for every integer x from 0 through 11, you’ll have yourself the ascii values for the string “Hello world!”. Well, I have a computer architecture exam in six hours and can’t be bothered, so I figured I would realize a lifelong dream […]
Of all the April Fools pranks that I came across today, the Stealth USB CapsLocker was my favorite. The tiny AVR-driven USB device sends random caps lock keypresses to a PC via a USB interface. The user will see their caps lock light come on from time to time and think they’ve accidentally hit that […]
