That bloke

I'm not religious, but I quite often wish I were. Look at these:
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2012/01/kalachakra_a_festival_of_teach.html

I downloaded a trial version of Microsoft Office 2010 for my SO. They e-mailed me a licence key. When I open the e-mail, Hotmail says "This message looks suspicious to our SmartScreen filters."

Hotmail is run by... Microsoft.

I don't much like Sudoku. Only if I'm really bored on the train to work do I do the ones in the paper. When they first became popular, rather than actually doing the puzzles, I wrote a Sudoku solver. It's surprisingly easy to get the solution if you give up on brain power and just use brute force.

You try putting a 1 in the first empty square and see if you've broken the rules about where the numbers are allowed. If you have, try a 2, and so on. At some point you find a number that's allowed, but it still may not be correct. The brute force part is that you just assume that it's right, and carry on looking for a solution. If you find one, your guess was good, and if you don't, just try another number.

When I say "carry on looking for a solution", what does that mean? The thing to notice is that a Sudoku puzzle with one more number filled in is just another Sudoku puzzle. So when we've guessed a number, the approach is the same as before: guess a number in the first empty square. We can solve the puzzle recursively. Eventually we may get to a grid where no number will fit in the first square. Oops. Somewhere in our chain of guesses we went wrong. No problem: just back up and guess again.

At the time I did this, I worked with someone who was very keen on Sudoku. He would do the most difficult puzzle in the newspaper, working hard at it, applying logic and deduction, painstakingly filling in one number after several minutes thought. I showed him what I'd done, and it offended his sense of rightness. How could something so challenging be solved by such a brain-dead method? He had a go at writing a solver, not with recursive guessing, but using intelligent deduction. It never worked. To be fair, he probably wasn't as obsessive about such things as I am, and I think that people have done it his way.

So that was the end of that, except that I found a web page for the shortest Sudoku solver, and tried compressing my code. I didn't get it as as short as the Python version, but pretty small. I'd solved an apparently difficult puzzle by writing code, and I forgot about it for a few years...

...until part 2 of the story

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Edit: couldn't find this earlier:

class S{boolean t(String g){int p=g.indexOf('0');if(-1==p){System.out.println(g
);return true;}for(char c='1';c<='9';c++){String n=m(g,c,p);if(null!=n&&t(n))
return true;}return false;}String m(String o,char c,int p){int r=p/9,k=p%9,b=r/
3*3+(k/3);for(int i=0;i<9;i++)if(o.charAt(i+r*9)==c||o.charAt(i*9+k)==c||o.
charAt(b*9+i+(i/3-b%3)*6)==c)return null;return o.replaceFirst("0",""+c);}
public static void main(String[]a){new S().t(a[0]);}}

Could probably be shorter (perhaps by inlining m), but I can't be bothered to think about it much. You need to give it an 81-digit string where zero represents an empty square.

Happy new year to both of the people who might read this.

I won't be making any resolutions and I'm not sure what sort of stuff I have to look forward to. More of the same, I suspect. I forgot to do nogopubmo this year, so perhaps I'll catch up with that... or perhaps not.

Anyway, I have tomorrow I have to go back to work. Boo-hoo!

Been to the doctor today with a dodgy stomach. Fair warning: squeamish people should stop reading RIGHT NOW. For the first time in my life I had to produce a stool sample. They gave me a sheet of instructions involving an ice cream tub. It's fascinating, revolting, and fairly humiliating. The sample pot and the bag you have to put it in are both see-through.

Instead of saying "stool sample" they should try "teaspoon of turd" or "poop in a pot".

One of the best things about being a parent is when your children reach the age that you can converse with them like adults. I had this with both of mine this weekend, and they were both a pleasure to talk to.

Another milestone that I remember clearly when EC was about seven or eight was sharing a joke. Little kids readily laugh at all sorts of silly stuff, but there was one particular time I remember when I was smiling for ages because he'd said something that made me laugh.

I'd be in trouble if they weren't good to talk to, or if they had no sense of humour, so that's turned out for the best.

In my job I write software. It's a curious world inhabited by some odd people. People often think I'm odd, so it's reassuring to spend time among the downright peculiar.

I remember Danish Dennis who sometimes didn't realise that he was speaking German instead of English and was puzzled that the manager didn't like him working until midnight then not turning up until noon. Then there was the one who never spoke to anyone if he could avoid it and never ate lunch, and the one who had duplicate copies of sci-fi films in different formats.

But the incomprehensible thing isn't their strange habits or their autistic spectrum interpersonal skills. What bothers me is that they don't notice when they are bad at what they do, and they don't want to improve their skills.

Sometimes I get asked about stuff and I'm met with blank looks. Fair enough (my explanation may be pants and/or some things are hard to grasp), but there's stuff you should know. With a certain amount of experience, some stuff should be easy, or at least familiar, and if it isn't and you don't want it to become so, surely you're doing the wrong job? Learning is a huge part of doing a techie job.

Finding out something new is exciting. Ooh, shiny! Doing things I've never done before, or just doing the same things in a better way is enough to make my day. Doing the same old stuff is depressing and diminishes me.

I wrote once about a high-vis jacket making me invisible. But it seems that this is an old idea. Here's a newspaper feature about a photographer who wears one to go un-noticed.

Not long ago I got fed up and went to look for alternatives to Spotify. I ended up with we7 because it wasn't perfect, but it let me listen to whatever I wanted. So now they've changed to focussing on "personalised radio stations", or in other words, they're going to choose the songs for me. WTF? They tended to do that anyway: if I'd queued up a few songs and they all finished then they would carry on with something they thought was similar. They weren't very good at guessing what I'd like.

So now there isn't much choice but their bad guesses. I am allowed to choose 50 songs a month, but that's not even two a day.

It's depressing. All I want is to be able to choose a song to listen to, and I'll happily listen to an advert to pay for that. No one seems to want to help me with this.

Not everyone has a first name and a surname. The only cross-cultural way to ask for someone's name is to give them a big box to type whatever's appropriate for them.

I knew this (Iceland and far east countries are interestingly different to Anglophone expectations), but I learned some new quirks from the W3C article on names (Spanish and Portuguese names are surprisingly complicated).

Tangentially, I also learned that it's hard to google for pictures of women called Rose. Here's my best attempt (but notice that some of the results are men): Search for "Rose" with the "Faces" option