Food for thought from TheHuey

Friday was “Hack day” at work and many ideas were worked on. At the conclusion of the day, we gathered for some entertainment at the poker table. We had 8 players, Mike(?), Senthil, Manish, Shawn, Gaurav, Vivek, Mike M., and Huey.

The action started fast as pot contentions got heated. Manish and Shawn built up quick leads as their stacks grew. My hands were all rags and grew steadily worse until a moment when an AK off suit landed in my hands. That being the best hand I’d seen all night, I pushed all in to be called by Gaurav’s pocket TT. The board came rags and I was forced to concentrate on dealing. After a few hands of dealing, I was able to convince the others to allow me to rebuy since I was dealer.
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A preliminary demo for my hack is already installed on this site. My hack was to take any text selections a user makes and allow them to search Y! Shopping for related products. You can see it at work by selecting any word or words on this page and then by clicking the little blue box that comes up next to it. Although you might find an obvious shopping term such as nikon digital cameras much more relavant.

This can be improved very easily. For example, instead of only searching Y! Shopping, the initial box can be a drop down menu populated with results from a text analysis tool. Then the user can perform a web/news/product search by following the corresponding links.

A key benefit to this implementation, any web publisher only needs to include a single (two at the moment) javascript reference in their header to receive this functionality. They don’t have to link terms by hand, or do any backend work to support this. They get better user experience and a richer webpage essentially for free.

This is the day. Yoyo Hu moved first time ever!! It feels like somebody is blowing tiny bubbles inside me. One and ….another. At first, I didn’t know what it was. I thought I was hungry or something, since it was lunch time. Then I realized it was something that I’ve never felt before. I asked myself. Is it him? Is it you? Yoyo Hu? He must be so tiny.  Touching me gently. What are you doing? Are you dreaming? Grow up fast. Daddy and mommy cannot wait to see you.

Here’s a plugin for people wishing to link to products within their blog. It’s simple to install and use and will allow you to add product titles and more by simply including <asin>1580420818</asin> in your posts or pages. I had written an earlier post but it was deleted accidentally. Here’s the shortened version.
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We completed our 3rd game of the 2006 season today. I’ve been lagging a bit on posting up game details. Last week, games 1 and 2 saw beautiful weather after about a month of rain and clouds. We originally planned to start in early April but mother nature was not cooperative.
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4/12 was a night of upsets and excitement. 9 adventurous players made their way to the table at MC2 TR6 for the evening’s activities. Players, in order of position, were Huey (dealer), Jason S., Dav Z., Chris F., Nam N., Yajie Y., Mike N., Selving G., and Mike M.
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Yoyo Hu, sex unknown, is expected to make its first appearence later this year in Santa Clara, CA. Expectant mother Yun Zheng is doing well and happily indulging in her craving attacks. I cannot stop smiling at the thought of holding our first baby soon.

Thus far, we’ve been able to keep the paparazzi at bay, but we expect to have photos of mother and father soon. Keep checking back for updates as we get them.

As we don’t know the sex of the baby yet, we have put off picking a name until we do. Yoyo Hu is the nickname his maternal grandparents have given him.

-Huey

Okay, so it doesn’t completely solve the puzzle yet. Using javascript to remove possible values from each block, the user can plug in hard values from the puzzle they are working on. The solver will try and arrive at a solution but you will be require to guess at some points. Improvements like a save point creation will be very helpful. Another improvement is to have the solver auto create a save point and branch until it gets to the final answer(s).

If you don’t know what sudoku puzzles are, check out sudoku

Here is my javascript solution to sudoku puzzles

Update: I’ve modified my sudoku solver to be a generic sudoku puzzle. You can play it for free at www.numbercrazy.com.

Due to the overwhelming popularity of blogs and the need to maintain some history, I’ve caved in to the pressure and am starting this blog.

Initial categories are just current events that I feel deserve their own categories.  Those will most likely change.  One other thing I will be adding will be a coding section for fun and new things on the web.

Please feel free to register and visit us weekly.

-Huey