SiRR (again)

I updated SiRR (SImple Rss Reader) to properly handle RSS (lots of guess-and-check involved here: keep trying different XPath expressions until one matches what you're looking for). It's available here.
Unzip and run setup. It'll prompt you to install the .NET 2.0 framework if you don't have it yet. after that it'll create a shortcut for itself in the start menu. It uses the default icon, sorry. support provided via e-mail (yuliy.pisetsky at the gmail.com domain [put it together yourself]), AIM (MntlChaos), and in person.

Warning: it's extremely fragile. Don't be surprised if an exception occurs. It's mostl likely because the file you fed it was bad. Make sure that it looks like an RSS or Atom feed.

Sirr

Last night, I installed Visual Studio 2005 on my machine. I decided to test out what I could do with it, and get my feet wet with C#, also. Thus I created a simple Atom feed reader. Point it to an Atom feed (such as the one for this blog: http://mntlchaos.blogspot.com/atom.xml), and it will let you sequentially read the posts on that blog. It uses an embedded web browser with most functionality disabled to display the posts. Links still work, though. Also, the title of each post is a clickable link to the post on the web (opens in default browser).

It's up here, but note that you need .NET framework 2.0, and that I haven't yet gotten it to work on any other machines. Find me online sometime and maybe I can work on getting a deployable version out.

Convex Hull. Yay!

static List compute(ArrayList points)
{
if(points.size() < 3) return points;
Collections.sort(points);

LinkedList upper = new LinkedList();
LinkedList lower = new LinkedList();

for( Point point : points)
{
upper.add(point);

while(upper.size() >= 3 && !rightTurn(upper))
{
upper.remove(upper.size() - 2);
}
}

for( int i = points.size() - 1; i >= 0; i--)
{
lower.add(points.get(i));

while(lower.size() >= 3 && !rightTurn(lower))
{
lower.remove(lower.size() - 2);
}
}
lower.remove(0);
lower.remove(lower.size() - 1);
upper.addAll(lower);
return upper;
}

Happy Birthday

Today is my great-grandmother's birthday. I think she is 85 now. I'm quite lucky that she is still alive, even though she is half a world away now (The town's name is apparently spelled Asipovicy, rather than the (in my opinion) more reasonable transliteration Osipovichy).