Programming

A Web Worker makes it possible to run Javascript code without blocking the user interface. That is, computations can be made in the background without locking the user interface.

Subversion holds various information in .svn directories placed in all directories and sub-directories under version control. Sometimes it is desireable to clean out these files, for example, prior to emailing a zip of the files. I use the awesome tool Total Commander for the job.

If you use more than one computer chances are that you use DropBox to keep a number of often used files syncronized and at hand.

I had my old Windows Pocket PC 2003 stolen from my office and until now I have developed on the emulator. However, now the need for a physical device has come up and I got the HP IPAQ 214.

Project Euler problem number #24 deals with permutations in lexicographical order. A non-brute force approach involves a mixed base number system based on factorials.

I have never completely understood why Visual Studio had to start another (graphical) utility in order to create GUIDs. I’m all for the UNIX kind of small (text based) utilities than can be combined. Furthermore, this utility creates GUID in formats that are useful to C++ programmers. Why have they not used the built in Macro system?

For a long time I had a strange problem on my workstation. Some programs crashed before showing a window. For example, I was unable to run programs in the standard Visual Studio projects folder under my documents and settings. But they ran fine when moved somewhere else. I suspected some permission problem but I could not find and thus fix it.

The familiar for loop featured in most if not all impertive langagues is not part of most functional languages if any because it has the mutable loop index. The standard way of looping in F# is to use recursion.

My previous task switcher application had a serious performance problem as it was programmed in .NET. In order to start the small utility you had to load up the CLR and a bunch of assemblies (dlls). If you are a .NET developer it might not be that big a problem as most of the code was already loaded up. However, for general use it was not the best option.

F# has a nice syntax for creating sequences where elements are created on demand.