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# Tuesday, May 05, 2009
Bonfire

How do grilled BBQ Ribs, a Cauldron of Brunswick stew, chicken, hotdogs & hamburgers sound for a Saturday in Spring? I thought it sounded great, so I'd like you to join me this Saturday for the festivities. Slated to be an extravaganza of southern food, your tastebuds will not soon forgive you for missing out.

Saturday, May 9th at 7pm


Please RSVP if you have not already



Some suggestions for items you might want to bring:

  • Chips / Dip
  • Sodas
  • Beer
  • Any Adult Beverages you might like (some will be provided)
  • Smores ingredients: Marshmallows, Chocolate Bars, Graham Crackers
  • A Blender (i have the stuff to make Margaritas, but a broken blender)
  • Anything else you might feel inclined to bring and share
  • Or, just bring yourself and a guest if you like

Looking forward to seeing you!



~Chris & Bridget

Tuesday, May 05, 2009 10:19:15 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    Comments [0] -
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# Saturday, March 21, 2009
The CWP Train in action
When Travis mentioned to the group that his Barbershop Quartet would be competing in a Barbershop Quartet competition right around the corner in Winston-Salem, NC, a few of us decided to attend to cheer him on. One day we were discussing it in the Common Area and some crazy ideas were thrown out, namely a few of us dressing up as a Train, befitting their group name, Grand Central. It turned into quite a crazy evening, as the video evidence to the right shows. Thanks to Bridget, Rex, Lucas, Brandon, Jason for your participation in the aforementioned silliness. I would also like to thank Tony and David for responding to our tweets and suppling the cardboard and UPS respectively. You may view the rest of the photos here on Flickr.
Saturday, March 21, 2009 3:53:31 PM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    Comments [1] -
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# Friday, March 20, 2009

MVI_4166
Originally uploaded by ballance5702
Testing the smokestack system for the official Grand Central train.
Friday, March 20, 2009 12:14:28 AM (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    Comments [0] -
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# Sunday, March 01, 2009

Google provides a Charting API with a host of useful charts. I spent a few minutes playing around with the map chart section to create a color-coded map of the states I have visited in the USA.

chart

The Venn Diagram was an interesting option that I had not expected, but good stuff.

chart

If you are building a dashboard, the Google-o-meter might come in handy

chart
Sunday, March 01, 2009 1:32:00 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0] -
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# Sunday, February 22, 2009

I find myself spending quite a bit of my spare time on Stackoverflow in recent weeks, and decided I wanted to display my current rep on my blog.  A few days ago I built a dynamically generated (and cached for 2 hours for traffic's sake) user ranking report, since my request for this on Uservoice was not approved.

HtmlAgilityPack has been my weapon of choice in recent days.  It was a good fit for this project and the end result looks like this:

stack overflow badge

And in case you might ask "Show me the code!" here you are.  Feel free to use it for your own project if you like.

<%@ WebHandler Language="C#" Class="Badge" %>

using System;
using System.Web;

public class Badge : IHttpHandler {
    
    public void ProcessRequest (HttpContext context) 
    {
        string includeLogo = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(context.Request.QueryString["useLogo"]) ? 
context.Request.QueryString["useLogo"] : string.Empty; string userId = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(context.Request.QueryString["userid"]) ?
context.Request.QueryString["userid"] : "1551"; string jsMode = !string.IsNullOrEmpty(context.Request.QueryString["jsMode"]) ?
context.Request.QueryString["jsMode"] : string.Empty; PageRetriever pr = new PageRetriever("http://stackoverflow.com/users/" + userId + "/"); pr.GetPage(); User userBadges = pr.ExtractBadge(); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(jsMode)) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/javascript"; context.Response.Write("document.getElementById('stackoverflowRep').innerHTML = '"); } else { context.Response.ContentType = "text/html"; } if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(includeLogo)) { context.Response.Write("<div style=\"height:40px\"><div style=\"float:left\"></div><div style=\"float:left;\">");
context.Response.Write(<img src=\"http://www.chrisballance.com/so/resources/stackoverflow-logo-250.png\" />");
} context.Response.Write(userBadges.Rep); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(includeLogo)) { context.Response.Write("<br /><a href=\"http://stackoverflow.com/users/"); context.Response.Write(userId); context.Response.Write("\">"); context.Response.Write(userBadges.Username); context.Response.Write("</a></div></div></div>"); } if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(jsMode)) { context.Response.Write("';\n"); } } public bool IsReusable { get { return false; } } }

 

Sunday, February 22, 2009 11:10:06 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0] -
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# Tuesday, February 17, 2009

Since I could not find a chart of some sort showing current rankings on StackOverflow.com, I decided to roll my own.  The link that follows points to a static cached version of the page that will only update manually for now.  Enjoy, and feel free to give your feedback or suggestions for improvements.

Current StackOverflow.com Rankings

Stackoverflow.com Rankings
Tuesday, February 17, 2009 1:16:09 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [1] -
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# Tuesday, February 10, 2009

F# has 'easy button' for finding large primes!  29 lines of code!  Thanks to Chris Smith and his 'completely unique view' on the Sieve of Eratosthenes

#light 

open System.Collections.Generic 
open System 

let findPrimes = 
    seq { 
        yield 2 //2 is a known prime

        let knownComposites = new HashSet<int>() 
        
        //Visit each odd
        for i in 3 .. 2 .. int 1E6 do 
            
            // Check known composites, if not present, it is prime.
            let found = knownComposites.Contains(i) 
            if not found then 
                yield i 

            // Add all multiples of i to our sieve, starting 
            // at i and irecementing by i. 
            do for j in i .. i .. int 1E6 do 
                   knownComposites.Add(j) |> ignore 
    } 
    
printfn "Here are the first 10001 primes:" 
Seq.iter (fun p -> printf "\t%d" p) (Seq.take 10001 findPrimes) 

Console.ReadKey(true)
Tuesday, February 10, 2009 12:15:23 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0] -
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# Monday, February 09, 2009

Euler #6 is very straightforward. I was concerned about needing to work with numbers > 2^32, but this was not a factor. I initially set my bound to < max instead of <= max which threw my results off my a small margin (1-99 instead of 1-100). Runtime is < 1 ms, only ~2400 ticks.

using System;
using System.Diagnostics;

namespace Euler6
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch();
            sw.Start();
            long result = SumDifference(1, 100);
            sw.Stop();
            Console.WriteLine("Runtime was " + sw.ElapsedMilliseconds + " ms");
            Console.WriteLine("Runtime was " + sw.ElapsedTicks +" ticks");
            Console.WriteLine("Sum difference is: " + result);
            Console.ReadLine();

        }

        static long SumDifference(int begin, int end)
        {
            return SquareOfSums(begin, end) - SumOfSquares(begin, end);
        }

        static long SumOfSquares(int begin, int end)
        {
            long returnValue = 0;
            for (int i = begin; i <= end; i++)
            {
                returnValue += Convert.ToInt64(Math.Pow(i,2));
            }
            return returnValue;
        }

        static long SquareOfSums(int begin, int end)
        {
            long returnValue = 0;
            for (int i = begin; i <= end; i++)
            {
                returnValue += i;
            }
            return Convert.ToInt64(Math.Pow(returnValue, 2));
        }
    }
}
Monday, February 09, 2009 11:01:49 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0] -
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This one was elusively easy since I went with a simple brute-force approach. Execution averages 1 second.
using System;
using System.Diagnostics;

namespace Euler5
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch();
            sw.Start();
            int lcm = FindLeastCommonMultiple();
            sw.Stop();
            Console.WriteLine("Runtime was " + sw.ElapsedMilliseconds + " ms");
            Console.WriteLine("Runtime was " + sw.ElapsedTicks + " ticks");
            Console.WriteLine("LCM is " + lcm);
            Console.ReadLine();
        }

        private static int FindLeastCommonMultiple()
        {
            for (int i = 2520; i < int.MaxValue; i += 20)
            {
                if (IsDivisibleByRange(i, 1, 20))
                    return i;
            }
            return -1;
        }

        static long SmallestNumber()
        {
            return factorial(20);
        }

        static long factorial(long n)
        {
            long returnValue = 1;
            for (int i = 1; i < n; i++)
            {
                returnValue *= i;
            }
            return returnValue;
        }

        static bool IsDivisibleByRange(int num, int begin, int end)
        {
            for (int i = begin; i <= end; i++)
            {
                if ((num % i) != 0)
                {
                    return false;
                }
            }
            return true;
        }
    }
}
Monday, February 09, 2009 10:44:54 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [0] -
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There is certainly a more efficient algorithm solve Euler #4, but here is my solution.  Runtime averages around 500ms.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Configuration;
using System.Diagnostics;

namespace Euler4
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            long maxPal = 0;
            long iMax = 0;
            long jMax = 0;
            Stopwatch sw = new Stopwatch();
            sw.Start();
            for (int i = 100; i <= 999; i++)
            {
                for (int j = 100; j <= 999; j++)
                {
                    long curPal = (long)(i * j);
                    if (CheckPallindrome(curPal))
                    {
                        if (curPal > maxPal)
                        {
                            maxPal = curPal;
                            iMax = i;
                            jMax = j;
                        }
                    }
                }
            }
            sw.Stop();
            Console.WriteLine("Runtime was " + sw.ElapsedMilliseconds + " ms");
            Console.WriteLine("Runtime was " + sw.ElapsedTicks + " ticks ");
            Console.WriteLine(iMax + " x " + jMax + " = " + maxPal);
            Console.ReadLine();
            
        }

        private static bool CheckPallindrome(long input)
        {
            PallindromeChecker pc = new PallindromeChecker();
            pc.Pal = input;
            return pc.IsPallindrome();
        }
    }

    class PallindromeChecker
    {
        private long _pal;
        private string forward, reverse;

        public long Pal
        {
            get
            {
                return _pal;
            }
            set
            {
                _pal = value;
            }
        }


        public bool IsPallindrome()
        {
            GetReversedLong();
            if (forward == reverse)
                return true;

            return false;
        }

        private void GetReversedLong()
        {
            forward = Convert.ToString(_pal);
            StringBuilder temp2 = new StringBuilder();

            char[] arr = new char[forward.Length - 1];
            arr = forward.ToCharArray();
            for (int i = forward.Length - 1; i >= 0; i--)
            {
                temp2.Append(arr[i]);
            }
            reverse = temp2.ToString();
        }
    }
}
Monday, February 09, 2009 10:26:20 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    Comments [1] -
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