Purposive without Foresight

My favourite feature of Kindle is that, it is easy to look up new words while reading. I’d also want to easily review the words I’ve looked up. Here’s the feature list of the vocabulary-building application I am conceiving: Keep track of the words I’ve looked up while reading. Each record should have the following [...]

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Dirk has programmed a game “Nine Men’s Morris” during his September vacation. He exerted every effort on the AI algorithm, GTK UI programming and the Debian/Windows package building ( If anyone sponsors him a Mac box, he will also release an installer for Mac. ). We have compared his program to many existing Morris games [...]

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need a hug now….

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Months ago my mother-in-law sent us a newspaper from Tübingen. It says in Tübingen, several middle schools start to offer Chinese as foreign language course, and students can take the Chinese exam for Abitur (you can understand it as Germany’s SAT of high school children). I thought the children would need some special staff paper [...]

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Among many plugins of the desktop manager Compiz Fusion, “Tile” is not the flashiest but one of the most useful plugins. I’m one of the programmers who need to look up API documentations/Wikis or cookbook/example repositories from time to time. I have a 22′ wide screen, fire Tile’s “Vertical Tile” command, API documentation and the [...]

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I started to learn and use Groovy last month. I feel like Groovy is like a programming language “Eintopf“, it aggregates some best characteristics of a variety of programming languages. No matter which programming style you prefer – procedural, functional, object-oriented, meta-programming, static typed, dynamic typed… – Groovy has much to offer. The most beautiful [...]

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Today I arrived at this page when I was checking out information about the MySql Falcon engine: http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Falcon Below is the part I found amusing: Falcon is NOT … Jim (Starkey) ‘s been at this for a long time, there have been some changes since he wrote his first database at DEC: Uni-processors to multi-core [...]

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Download the pdf keymap: eclipse-ganymede-keymap.pdf In office I work with IDEA and Microsoft Visual Studio C++ on Windows. At home I use Eclipse on Debian Lenny/Sid (Desktops managed by Compiz-fusion B-) ). These programs have very different key bindings, I want cheatsheets for quick look-ups. IDEA ships with a pdf keymap. There are keymaps for [...]

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Most of the time, I work with various APIs. The quality of the API documentation significantly influence my efficiency. My favourite is the cookbook-ish API doc always with some quintessential examples showing how to use the API calls to accomplish a certain task. A cookbook-ish User-Howto plus API reference listing the UMLs of the API [...]

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The original puzzle Participation Rules The rule in the first sentence of the old man is obvious. The mathematician cannot decide the solution after he was told the second condition. This indicates that there are more than one triple of numbers whose products are 36 and sums are the same. The third condition tells that [...]

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Start date: August 1st, 2008. Submission deadline: August 15th, 2008. Please post your solution to: droolspuzzle@gmail.com Participation Rules Ages of the Sons Difficulty level: settler An old man asked a mathematician to guess the ages of his three sons. Old man said: “The product of their ages is 36.” Mathematician said: “I need more information.” [...]

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Drools Puzzles is a periodic puzzle-solving contest. Anybody can compete in a round except the puzzle poster himself. For now a problem-solving cycle is about 2 weeks. Puzzles are posted by the winner of last round. A participator can post her solution to mailto:droolspuzzle@gmail.com All solutions are evaluated after the deadline of a round, on [...]

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I have encountered questions like how to use rules in a typical JEE application in Seam forum. And there are some other questions on general application design too. I have been using Seam and Drools together and figured out a way which ties the business logic to entities in an ultimately flexible manner and this [...]

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I am running into an approximate string matching(aka fuzzy string matching, inexact string matching) problem on my Diplomarbeit. Dirk showed me some papers on this topic and coded a tiny c++ program for me to learn. I got the idea and coded a Java Approximate String Matching demo based on the algorithm described by Boy [...]

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