Wow!
I received my FritzBox 7170 today, as a present from XS4ALL for renewing my ADSL subscription for another year (cheap deal — I would have done that anyway). And it totally blows away my Thompson Speedtouch!
Archive for June, 2009
FritzBox!
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009Golfing with prime factors
Sunday, June 14th, 2009Dirk-Jan reminded me of the Perl Golf and Code Golf contests, both of which have the aim of solving a simple programming task in as few characters of source code as possible. See his post for a stunning example.
One of the open challenges is to work out the prime factors of a given number. To make things a little more difficult, the output must be printed in a specific format:
7000: 2^3 5^3 7
123456789: 3^2 3607 3803
Obfuscate your numbers!
Sunday, June 7th, 2009Time for some silliness.
In a little over a month, I will be
years old.
What’s that, you didn’t get it? Here, I’ll repeat it for you in terms you may understand more easily:
At work, it has become a bit of a tradition that when people announce their birthday, they do so in an at least somewhat obfuscated format. Hexadecimal, binary and more obscure number formats are always popular, of course, as are silly descriptions of the form “my age is the ninth distinct biprime“. But last year I decided to take it to the next level, and write a little generator in Ruby for expressions such as the ones you see above. As you can probably guess, the expressions are generated using TeX.
You can play with it for yourself, if you want to, and also download the latest version of the code. But please be gentle with my server, as you can probably guess it’s a rather heavy application and I’m running this site on a little home PC..