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indicating what the purpose of the code in the file is, piss me off.

That is all.

(Seriously, NONE of these files have ANY indication of what they are. They are named OK I guess, but it still is annoying not ever being 100% sure of what some code's purpose in life is...)

I am taking this Programming Competitions Preparations class. The problems are all horribly unrealistic and not represenative of Software Engineering at all, but then again, they are not really meant to be.

Problems are solved in a two hour period in a team, typically of 3-5 students.

Well, my team realized that today's problem could be easily solved if we plotted points on a grid.

Hmm, lets see now. The largest a coordinate can be is 40,000. Ok simple, declare a 40,000 X 40,000 array of booleans.

Oh, too large for the stack, ok, declare it on the heap.

Umm, hey why is this taking so long.

Wait, what is 40k * 40k again? Oh crap.

Just for laughs, open up Task Manager and hit "Run", watch the VM usage go up to 1.90GB. Hey, look, I can see principles from my Operating Systems class in action! Awesome!

Hey, wait, did Windows just swap everything out to disk? Wow, everything is taking awhile to get back in order.

So, who here can quickly implement a sparse matrix?

To be fair, such stupidities only occure because there is a hard time limit. Normally I would never hard code in an array of anything near that size. Indeed, I do not know of any students here who would ever hard code in an array and say "That should be enough".

Every time the debugger jumps in on a break point, focus has changed! Doh!

A simple implementation of tags!

I'd link to it, but it is on a non-routable box, I should have it up on a routable machine tomorrow[1].

Using Ruby this time. I now have a distain for Ruby, mostly because finding resources about it online is almost impossible. :(

I didn't use, just straight eruby (most often implemented as mod_ruby) with the CGI module used to get form data.

Oh, how Ruby handles file upload in forms is the most immensely stupid thing I have seen in awhile, and a damn good argument AGAINST dynamic typing. The type returned DEPENDS on the size of the data that was uploaded. ...

Data set is populated from CuteOverload. :-D

[1] I was about to paste in the local host address when the duh factor hit me.

Ever had to find your way around a huge college campus? How about ever been late for a class or meeting on a regular?

AJAX to the rescue!

WWU Route Finder is a proof of concept of an AJAX map using Canvas and Python. Click two buildings, and the Python back end, accessed using XMLHTTPRequest of course, shows you the shortest path between your start and destination.

The biggest advantage is that the Python back end can access a highly optimized Graphing library and potentially support real time processing of hundreds of thousands of nodes, taking advantage of the server hardware and not relying upon the performance of a browser's Javascript engine.