scoundrod-blog

[scoundrod-blog]

I’m playing around the Unity in MSVS 2017.  I programmed directly to video cards with OpenGL.  This is the first time I’m using a midlayer and I like how much work Unity does.  It has great layers and lighting along with textures and materials.  Moreover, it has built-in physics and collision detectors.  It does a lot of the heavy lifting.

[scoundrod-blog]

lol

[scoundrod-blog]

[scoundrod-blog]

I didn’t know there was such a thing.  Given >7 billion people on the planet, I’m sure there are a great array of orientations with which I’m not familiar.  How commonplace is it to be “ace”?  Is it nature vs. nurture or does that not have anything to do with it?  Are there different age ranges in which this is more prevalent?  i.e, young boys thing young girls are yucky for awhile, then they hit puberty and most change their tune.

What are "ace" people?

asexual people, they don’t experience sexual attraction

[scoundrod-blog]

As I look back over the 35 years of code I’ve written (nevermind that - last week’s FileStream IO Encoding/Decoding), I often wonder “what was I thinking?”  A little documentation goes a long way.  I don’t flowchart.  I don’t make cutesy Class Diagrams using the preferred UML standard.  I make notes on napkins, scratchpads, and the backs of business cards.  I DO, however, document.

One of my CS teachers dropped this the other day

[scoundrod-blog]

Eclectic

In reviewing my posts, I’ve decided I’m an eclectic dude.

[scoundrod-blog]

Stepping out for Halloween...

[scoundrod-blog]

OK, so I cook a little also.  Found lamb on sale.  Figured I’d try Gordon Ramsey’s herb-crusted lamb recipe.  All I can say, is that I French better than he.  I went with a 2014 Ravenwood Zinfindel.  I know, not a top shelf bottle, but it did fine.  Msg me for how to and I’ll walk you through it.

[scoundrod-blog]

How BBQ gets done in St Louis.  Sugarfire’s beef brisket sandwich.

[scoundrod-blog]

The cat is critical of my sorting algorithm.

[scoundrod-blog]

Did you know? CS

Did you know there is a much faster way to compute greatest common divisor?

Let’s say we have a program and we want to know the gcd of two integers. We could go about finding this by a for loop, going from 1 to the smallest number (assuming the second integer is the smaller number) and seeing if each number divides into both numbers. We then return the largest number that divided into both. The code for this may look something like this:

But what if our numbers are fairly large? That for loop would go from 2 to some huge number, and that would be rather slow. What if there was a faster way to do it? Well, that’s where number theory comes into play.

Let me just get the hypothetical stuff out of the way real quick. Let’s create two integers, a and b, and write them as such: a = bq + r. So if we can write a as a product of b (the smaller number) and q (the quotient) plus r (the remainder), this makes things much easier for us. We know what a and b are, so how do we figure out q and r? We can get q by using integer division on a / b (so we ignore any fractional part), then get r = a - bq or r = a % b.

So what does any of that mean? Let’s look at an example:

When we get to 0, we know the last b (13 in this case) is the greatest common divisor. That makes any set of horrifying numbers not as threatening. It’s also fairly simple to implement in code:

And to show you it’s significantly faster, let’s compare the two functions and benchmarked the results using C#’s Stopwatch.

Pretty cool, right? Some people have taken this algorithm and extended it to push it to its limits and make it even faster! Of course, this starts getting more complicated and involves even more math. But this algorithm is absolutely fine for our purposes. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed this! I want this blog to be more than just Apptober stuff, so expect more stuff like this in the future!

[scoundrod-blog]

Watch your hot cup of coffee or tea carefully, and you may notice a white mist of tiny micron-sized droplets hovering near the surface. These microdroplets are a little understood part of evaporation. They form over a heated liquid, levitating on vapor that diffuses out from them and reflects off the liquid surface. (This is similar to the Leidenfrost effect, but the authors note it occurs at much lower temperatures. Unrelated research has suggested the Leidenfrost effect can occur at lower temperatures when there is very little surface roughness.) 

One of the particularly peculiar behaviors of these tiny levitating microdroplets is that they can exist over dry surfaces as well. The image above shows microdroplets migrating from a liquid surface (right) to a dry surface (center and left). When the droplets near the contact line, they encounter a strong upward flow due to increased evaporation there. This launches the droplets upward and they sail to the dry area. There, their vapor layers continue creating levitation and provide a cushion between them and their neighbors, causing the drops to self-organize into arrays. (Image credit: D. Zaitsev et al.; via Physics World; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

[scoundrod-blog]

I defined a class (RegistrationInfo) as a strongly typed data structure to hold user input from one ASP.NET webpage (Registration.aspx) to be displayed on another ASP.NET webpage (Results.aspx).

My confusion is in the syntax.  Inside Registration page class,  I define the get property as:  

public RegistrationInfo RegistrationInfo    {        get        {            return new RegistrationInfo            {

              .....

and I access it from the Results page class with:

RegistrationInfo ri = PreviousPage.RegistrationInfo;

It all works fine.  My confusion is WHY it works?  I guess I’m still new to C# syntax as a C++ developer.  In the top code snipet, is the first RegistrationInfo the return type for a default self-named constructor of some regard?

[scoundrod-blog]

Source: unknown 

[scoundrod-blog]

Vortex rings can only occur when the complete circle is within the medium (smoke rings in air, air bubbles in water), they break as soon as the ring touches the boundary of the medium (such as when the air bubble break the surface of the water).  You get 1/2 a vortex ring when you battle hard in a canoe, but it quickly dissipates because only 1/2 the ring is submerged.

In slow motion, vortex rings can be truly stunning. This video shows two bubble rings underwater as they interact with one another. Upon approach, the two low-pressure vortex cores link up in what’s known as vortex reconnection. Note how the vortex rings split and reconnect in two places – not one. According to Helmholtz’s second theorem a vortex cannot end in a fluid–it must form a closed path (or end at a boundary); that’s why both sides come apart and together this way. After reconnection, waves ripple back and forth along the distorted vortex ring; these are known as Kelvin waves. Some of those perturbations bring two sides of the enlarged vortex ring too close to one another, causing a second vortex reconnection, which pinches off a smaller vortex ring. (Image source: A. Lawrence; submitted by Kam-Yung Soh)

Note: As with many viral images, locating a true source for this video is difficult. So far the closest to an original source I’ve found is the Instagram post linked above. If you know the original source, please let me know so that I can update the credit accordingly. Thanks!

[scoundrod-blog]

Dear dudes:

I like seeing beautiful women.  I look at women as art of the world.  But if you honk your horn or yell “hey baby” from your window, how do you think that makes the woman feel?  Is she flattered by your attention or is she quietly thinking “omg, do I need to worry about that creep?”  If you find a woman beautiful, be sincere with your compliments.  Don’t ruin it.  I have yet to meet a couple met over a horn blast and feel in love.

[scoundrod-blog]