Terminal Illusions

Flocking makes for a nice screen-saver - see here for a nice JS demo, and this pseudocode for a nice, dirt simple explanation. Managing so many objects interacting in space, even 2D, calls for some spatial data structures. The approach of buckets in 1D, and sorting + binary searching in the other dimension seems to work well for my flocking screen saver. 64 bit in Lion (hmm. and Snow Leopard?) break 32 bit screen saver modules (bah!) and also Saver Lab. Can capture screenshots with another OSX command line tool, screencapture.

Simple Flocking ScreenSaver

GDB in Visual Studio - they are working on an Android NDK version,
which could be a great improvement on current tools, if it worked.


The C++ language has plenty of odd corners; but so do the standard libraries, and the cross platform variations. The std::string class can surprise on some platforms with its Copy On Write semantics and the sharing of underlying memory buffers.

Every new version of Windows breeds a new bit of software to handle disk images, see WinCDEmu for Windows 7.


Getting a visa to travel to the states can be done online. The EU should reciprocate with US visitors until this nonsense gets stopped. 


Consider Lockharts lament; replace "maths" with "programming", and ponder on education now. And recall how maths was taught, too. Ick.


The HunSpell spell checker has many dictionaries. The executable can be controlled via pipes from Java. There is a Swedish dictionary from "The Big Swedish Wordlist".