More On Creative Math

Ok, Lately I have been really interested in math again. It just so happens that I caught one of my weekly Computer Science & Engineering video lectures on UWTV... this week the topic of discussion was Software For Algebra and Geometry Experimentation or SAGE. Very cool lecture from the man that started it all... (William Stein) Written mostly in python... this application does some really advanced level interpretations and the contributors to the project use SCRUM which is also cool. If you ever wanted to know how to calculate something or find the polynomial or calculate polynomials click on the link above and explore the world of SAGE.

C# Math Creativity

Alright, after checking out Karsten's blog I was immediately inspired... so I ran out to B&N and got the book Flash Math Creativity. Since I have an extensive background in flash I thought I would check it out... turns out it covers quite a bit which really helps me in the C# world. One of the modules I am working on right now for DirectorsMate is a Formation Helper module which allows a director or coach to specify how many team members they have and pick a basic formation shape... for instance if I have 24 members on my team and I want a Circle formation all I have to do is specify 24 and click the circle button. Behind the scenes I loop 24 times, and each time i create an ellipse shape and position it in a specified location using standard math that I picked up in the book. If you're ever doing Formulas or Math Calculations in C#... you need to take a look at Flash Math Creativity... it maps to C# seamlessly.

Shifting Sands Of The Company Structure

At my day job I am basically in a team of two developers... the guy who's been with the company from the beginning and myself. About a week ago I was informed that the other guy was planning on leaving the company... leaving myself to basically handle his duties and mine. With only being part of the company for a single year and having all of this responsibility kind of dumped on my plate is honestly a bit frightening. There are so many good things that can come from this sudden shit of sands... I can streghten my development skills, and project management skills even further. Although, it is a lot to take on... especially since now I will be potentially in charge of areas such as back-end database, web site, ftp, billing department applications, testing, staging evironments to name a few.

We'll have to see how it all unfolds over the summer....

Understanding EULA and FEULA

For those of you out there who are putting together software for your start up know that at some
point you will have to put together a EULA (End Users Licenses Agreement) or FEULA (Fair End Users Licenses Agreement). Having one of these in place protects you from end users who want to basically do harm to your company in court... I have been around and around and have decided to go with the FEULA and tweak it for my needs... thankfully their is a lawyer in the family on my wife's side. If you can gather up the means I highly suggest you have your EULA or FEULA looked over by a lawyer before putting on your install.

Working with Decimals in C#

I recently ran in to a bind while working on the ScoreSheet CTP, and once I figured it out I thought I might blog about it... just in case anyone else has similar issues out there.

ScoreSheet is a try-out system I am building for teams that hold try-outs for a specific event... and inside it resides a calculator engine that I use, and well a requirement came in which needed to be able to get the total score no matter what it is and view it as a percentage.

I came up with the following procedure which works out quite well...

Converting Collections in .NET 2.0

So last night I was having a bit of an issue with getting the values from my Dictionary<string,int> to a normal generic List<int>.

I figured it out and just knew their had to be a better way, so I asked a co-worker of mine the next morning and got the following result after collaborating with him... of course the results were much better this time around.



As you can see from above I just pass the values from the dictionary to the constructor of the collection I want to convert to. I am able to do this because the constructor takes IEnumerable as a parameter... any collection which inherits IEnumerable can be passed in.
In the future always look for this first, for it may be the solution your looking for when converting collection in .NET 2.0

Bouncing back and forth between .NET 1.1,2.0, and 3.0

Ok, for those of you out there who can sympathise... you know how frustrating this can be.
A typical day consist of the following 10 steps...

1) Wake up... go to work... migrate delphi to C# 1.1 and maintain
2) Daily meetings on design ideas for migrating C# 1.1 to 2.0
3) 6pm, can it be already.... get home... fire up Vista... and Continue the Revolutionary C# 3.0 Application which will one day change the world.
4) Work Out/Shower
5) Family Time & Dinner Time
6) Spouse Time & favorite T.V. Shows
7) Tuck the little one in bed.
8) Back to the C# 3.0 Application
9) Read for a little while.
10) Bed Time