I know this is almost a year old, but the permutations algorithm was my favorite from STL and I’ve had occassion to miss it since moving to .NET, so it was nice to find Dr. James McCaffrey’s Using Permutations in .NET for Improved Systems Security on msdn.com. The security implications are interesting, I suppose, but permutations are useful than that (like if you’re trying to crush librarians…).

It's pretty cool for to see industry competitors, Microsoft, AOL, Earthlink, etc, to work together against a common foe: spammers. This gives me hope that warring nations will be able to band together when the alien invasion comes. : )

Apparently someone has an early copy of Visual Studio 2005 and has stumbled onto the big feature we've been saving for an important keynote.

I look at Krzysztof Cwalina’s post on delegated-based APIs in combination with generics and I think of the best parts of STL-like template-based programming without all the STL or templates causing the blinding pain just behind your eyes.

Here.

The one where I write two computer programs, neither of which do as well as the two librarians they’re up against (damn librarians…).

Earlier this week, BradA asked the community for feedback on the guys that work for him (it’s review season again at Microsoft). Adam had this to say in response:

“I’m waiting for the first blogger to suggest that we should let the development community choose when we go to the bathroom. Is there no internal process that doesn’t benefit from ‘community involvement’?”

When folks complain about too much community involvement, I judge we’re at just the right level. : )

Here. The one where I try a couple of experiments in social video to bring me closure to my friends and get half-way there.

Saturday, June 26th, 2004

Can’t come up with a better palindrome than “a man, a plan, a canal, Panama!”? Write a program and come up with one that’s 17,000+ words. I love computers and what people do with them.

The most extreme thing I ever did along these lines is when my airplane was circling an airport for some unknown reason and the United flight attendant announced a contest to keep our minds off the dwindling fuel and the terrorists on the ground (oh, wait, that’s Die Hard…). Anyway, she offered a free bag of peanuts (or something of equal value) to the person that could come up with the most words of 3 or more letters from the letters in the word “united” (Always Be Closing…).

Did I put my Tim Ewald-expanded vocabulary to work? Did I scratch words onto a cocktail napkin as fast as I could think of them?

No. In the limited time I had, I wrote a program that would come up with random combinations of letters in brute force fashion, then dumped the unique ones to a file so that I could use Word’s spell checker to find the real words. I came up with 32. Did I win?

No. A librarian, using her own expanded vocabulary beat me with 34 (I had been running the program to generate 1000 possibilities to speed testing but forgot to flip it back to 10,000 when it came time to run it for real).

Did I stop there? Did I accept defeat gracefully, especially since it’s pretty clear I had cheated in the first place?

No. I went home and learned the STL permutation algorithm and wrote a program that compared against a dictionary from the web to find the 72 words of 3 or more letters in “united” (including asynchronous updates to the UI as possibilities are checked [it takes a little longer, but it’s worth it…]).

Now I carry that program on my laptop wherever I go, just in case I run into that damn librarian again…

P.S. I did get to use my program one more time against my mother playing Scrabble. I got my all-time high Scrabble score ever on that day. She still beat me. Did I mention she’s got a bachelor’s degree in library science? Damn librarians…

Discuss