Some Random Thoughts

I don’t think I will be posting regularly because college is starting soon and I have been caught up with some other work. Programming has taken somewhat of a backseat, which means my learning process is impeded. Last thing I thought about doing was writing a Su Do Ku solver. I had tried writing one earlier but had left it incomplete (like so many other things that I do) and thought I should get back to it. Had a brief look at the program and then decided to perfect it sometime soon. I just wanted to post a few random thoughts that were in my mind.

Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition – this is pretty old news but I thought I should write about it. Microsoft has decided to being out the Express Edition for home users and hobbyists. It’s a stripped down version of their Visual Studio Suite and it’s available for download on their webiste – Absolutely Free! Now that’s nice.

I also saw this link to Microsoft’s coding4fun. Of course it’s fun because it’s all related to games, entertainment and stuff, but the kind of programming they do still seems out of reach. I’ve realised how much experience and time you require to become a good programmer. Just to write a Firefox extension, I think you need to know quite a lot. That’ll be something I’d like to do in the future.

I happened to come across my friend’s Google Notebook on Javascript and I found it a pretty good reference for Javascript beginners. And I felt relieved that Javascript is somewhat like Actionscript (I think Actionscript was based on Javascript) and hopefully I’ll be able to learn it faster. Most of his notes (rather, all) are from the Javascript section of the W3Schools site, which I found pretty impressive. It’s got free tutorials on everything related to web development. They’ve also got a whole load of examples which you can edit online, and view the results on their website, which I thought was pretty cool.

Here’s some disappointing news for me. The guy whom I’m working with on the Laplace’s Equation solver program wrote the same thing using malloc for dynamic memory usage to store the required values. He has a pretty high end computer, with a 64-bit Linux OS (Gentoo I think) installed on it. And he took just about 8 minutes for a 1000×1000 grid!!! Thats a zillion time faster than what I had tried! Worse configuration? Windows? Visual C++? Other running programs? 32-bit OS? Did all these things make it worse or was it just the dynamic data created using malloc vs. vector data type?

The code he described to me (over IM) was:

float *u=malloc(num*num); //num*num is the size of the grid
element=u[n]; //just use it like a normal array

I haven’t had a look at the full source code yet and have asked him for it, but he says there’s not much difference elsewhere.

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