stevengharms

I realize now that in my very-rarely updated “movie’s I’ve recently seen” box said that I had seen Sense and Sensibility. That is certainly not the case (unless I had found a time-machine and seen the movie in such a way so as to not start a paradoxical cascade of unfortunate side-effects, which I’m fairly sure I could not avoid doing). Instead I recently, at that time, had seen Pride and Prejudice.

I mean one is about girls without money to their name trying to get beneficial marriages and the other one is about girls without money trying to get beneficial marriages. Duh!

I’m finally to the last doorstop installment of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle. I’m only 892 dense pages from finding out how the story of these Baroque heroes and thieves winds up.

Boy, I sure will be glad to return to the realm of books that can be carried around smartly in the outer pouch of your bag. This thing causes a goiter-like presence to surface when put in my bag. I feel a bit like Charlie Brown lugging about War and Peace. Nevertheless, I’m excited to see how our wily blackguard Jack will go against the icy wiles of Isaac Newton in pre-Georgian London-town.

It has been said that he who has much knowledge has much worry.

Sayeth Steven: He who has sexy laptop has much interest in bags.

Following my new favorite lusty consumerism for guys site: Uncrate, I found this bag.

What was particularly interesting to me was this comment:

“Product of Australia - Assy in China”

And suddenly I thought of a half-Chinese, Dickensian Australian reflecting upon his life and thinking this line.

“It was in late 2005 that my father found himself working in Guangdong province as an advisor to the then-nascent Huang textile plants. After 3 months in the Chinese industrial capitol, he found himself sharing the evenings with my mother, a manager at the Huang assembly facility. After a hasty decision to engage in the holy estate of matrimony, and an even-more-hasty return to Queensland, I was born in Brisbane where the provincial Chinese heritage was to run head-on against the rough-and-tumble easy of Australian life. My life could be summed up in the tags of so many textile products shipped to Australia from Guangdong: Product of Australia, assembly in China.

“To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.” - Theodore Roosevelt

“One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.” - William F. Buckley

When Buckley speaks movement conservatives listen. Will Bush hoist his own petard and “cut and run”.

….in time for the mid-term elections?

Tick…..tick….

I’m so totally excited for V for Vendetta.

The Wachowskis, oh how they burned me last time. Like a cheating partner, I’m not sure I can trust them again. Like a woman in any movie on Lifetime, I’m going to give them another chance, despite my better judgment.

I loved the graphic novel and I really hope that the movie will match my expectation.

I know this to be a formula for disaster, but I hope its good.

When i bent over to put socks on this morning i felt my back crack and become itchy and I realized my skin was dry.

In my days before habitating with my female I think I would have gotten dressed and gone to work.

This morning I went into her bathroom and asked if she could use that funny stuff that makes my back gloppy (Logh-shun i think it’s called) that makes me not itchy.

Yay.

I finished the application, have fun running it on MacOSX 10.4+ machines.

I’ve got so much to write stored up! I’ve been driving my spare computer time into the Sudoku application and haven’t had a chance to work on the literary angle. I want to write about:

• Keira Knightley’s teeth of doom
• The Mellies
• My work at work (hint)
• Learning Ruby and Ajax
• Other Things (tm)

Keep your eyes peeled, I’ll be making up for missing in action shortly.

I have finished my first program: SudokuGrid. Here’s what it looks like.

This is the starting grid. It’s blank here, but you can see the “alignment highlighter.” As those of you who work Sudokus (Sudokii?) know, you can’t have a conflict within the 3x3 grid, along the horizontal, or along the vertical. These guides help with that.

Now you might think that entering a “given” set of numbers would be a real pain, having to change the selection to 1-9, click in the cell, make the change, look at your source, etc. To this point I added the “fastFill” feature. By entering the numbers (and “-” for blanks) you can fill a grid quite quickly!

Naturally, after a first load you might want to save the original so that you can back up in case you go down a wrong path in working towards your solution!

For tiny errors you can, of course, this being Mac OSX the greatest OS and best programming environment around, use command-Z to go back before your latest change.

As you progress you can use “givens” (shown in green) “answered cells” (shown in blue) and pencil-marks to ultimately solve your grid.

And a solved grid looks mighty fine in SudokuGrid!

Although you may not like my color scheme and may want to make your grid look absolutely atrocious. SudokuGrid supports such retina-scarring configurations:

I’m finishing up the help documentation and am going to try to find a site where I can host the binary (VersionTracker maybe?) with better throughput / fewer bandwidth restrictions than my blog hosting company. It’s a 40MB download and I think I could soon find my bandwith restriction taxed.

Well, as I said in my previous post, I’ve been pretty busy at work and at home. While I won’t go into the great details of the former (too much background required to appreciate it) I’ve completed my first Cocoa Program: SudokuGrid.

SudokuGrid is a tool that will let you enter a grid that you find (from a book, off the internet, etc.) and will let you solve it. It’s still a very early release, but it’s such a big milestone I feel like I have to share it with the world.

Furthermore, I need to take a bit of a break from it. The next post will address the tool.