This is the best I could come up with.

\alpha \stackrel{?}{=} \beta gave me .

Close enough, although the question mark is a little high. Wordpress LaTeX stuff provided by this plugin modified from this one.

Update: Lisa recommended this:

\alpha \stackrel{_?}{=} \beta renders as . Much better, thanks!

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I’ve had to do this in lots of languages, but the source here is in C#. The approach is similar for other languages. Each octet of the IP address is 8 bits, so we start an accumulator at 0, XOR with the first bit, shift the accumulator left 8 bits, rinse, repeat.

Pretty compact. I’ve mostly used this for getting the 32-bit unsigned integer representation of the running machine, so I pull the string IPAddress off the network card in a normal fashion (maybe like so or so or resolve anything like so).

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About a year ago, I was looking for a wordpress plugin that would allow me to display entire hands of cards (for example, a poker hand). I ran into this plugin, but each card had to be surrounded by a tag; this wasn’t what I wanted. So, I decided to roll my own

• Download Link: playing-card-hands-v1_0.zip
• Installation:
  1. Download and unzip the plugin to your wordpress plugin directory. On Linux, this might look like …
     cd wp-content/plugins
wget http://www.oddsblogs.com/wp-content/uploads/playing-card-hands-v1_0.zip
unzip playing-card-hands-v1_0.zip
  2. In your wordpress administration page, go to the “Plugins” tab and click “Activate” to activate the plugin.
• Usage: Surround the hand you want by the [cards]...[/cards] tag. Separate individual cards by spaces. The first character indicates the card rank (2-A), the last the card suit (c, d, h, s for clubs, diamonds, hearts, spades, respectively). For example, [cards]th jh qh kh ah[/cards] produces T♥J♥Q♥K♥A♥, a royal flush. Sometimes you want to show say ace ace, or any diamond, or maybe any king or something; [cards]a a d k[/cards] gives you A A  ♦K .
• License: GPL.
• Credits: The CSS was partially borrowed from the Card Converter Plugin, which I believe was partially borrowed from The (Unofficial) World Poker Tour Fan Site.

Feel free to edit the CSS if you’re so inclined.

Leave a comment or a trackback if you find the plugin useful, please!

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I couldn’t find a Spy++ clone for linux (maybe it’s not possible…I don’t know) to reveal the value of the password field.

After a little searching, it seems Epiphany is Mozilla based (or uses the same directory structure). I found this page for recovering the password saved in Mozilla; it’s very similar in Epiphany. The password was saved in

~/.gnome2/epiphany/mozilla/epiphany/[random number].s


I guess it was base-64 encoded. I plugged the password in (minus the ~) to the javascript to decode it, worked like a charm. So frustrating when this simple stuff isn’t documented anywhere…

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The simple, logical approach to randomizing arrays is to loop through the array, and swap each element with some random element. This might look something like below.

Here, swap interchanges two array elements (brilliant, I know).

While this does indeed “mix up” the elements of the array, it doesn’t model true card shuffling. To shuffle a deck of cards, we want to produce one out of all the possible permutations (different arrangements or orderings) of the deck, where each occurs with equal probability. How many different permutations are there of n cards? For the first position, there are n choices, times (n-1) choices for the second, and so on, so n! (n factorial).

So whatever method we use to shuffle the array, we want there to be n! different orderings. Now, back to the piece of code above. For the first position, there are n possibilities (where n=length). For the second position, there are also n possibilities, and the same for every other position. This gives us nⁿ possibilities. This is too many!

Fortunately, this is an easy fix. At each iteration, we want one less possibility to choose from. The for loop counter is handy for this.

I think this is a great example of how simple algorithm analysis can improve code.

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I searched the PHP forums, but this really isn’t a “date and time” issue (as far as PHP functions for real dates and times are concerned). It could be that a solution is listed there, but I couldn’t find it quickly. What can I say, my attention span is measured in nanoseconds.

I was using integers for the hour loop, so they were in military time. I needed a quick and dirty function to convert these integers to 12-hour format. This is what I ended up with.

I’m a big fan of ternary operators, they can really make your code compact.

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