First of all, thank you to everyone who took part in the Friday The Thirteenths puzzle at LessThanDot. We had some great entries from all types of different languages such as .NET, SQL Server, VB6, VBA, ASP, VBScript, Javascript, Java, Perl, Ruby and Python! It was a great response from everyone and it was a very nice introduction to our first weekly puzzle so once again thank you to all contributors.
This week, the puzzle is entitled "Regular Pentagon" and the rules are:
Given a grid co-ordinate (x,y) as the centre point of a regular
pentagon, and the sum of the length of the sides, return the
co-ordinates of each point as: "Top", "MidLeft", "MidRight",
"BottomLeft", "BottomRight" and the distance from the centre to each of
the points.
This should work for any possible position of the centre point, and any length of the sides.
- All Sides are equal length in a Regular Pentagon
- x = horizontal scale, y=vertical
- scale increments can be anything you wish.. mm, cm, inches, feet, etc (doesn't matter) - though only whole units can be used
For added points, make it work for any regular polygon (and even further added points for calculating the area)
Again, any programming language is acceptable and we are looking for interesting methods that you can come up with to solve the puzzle. Remember, it's just a bit of fun and we'd like to think it will enjoyable for you to come up with a great way to solve it!
We've decided to do a recurring feature at LessThanDot and
have a "Programmer Puzzles" section with interesting puzzles published.
This week the challenge has been set to "identify all friday the
thirteenths for a given timeframe". You can use any programming language you like, just please let people know which one you have decided to use!
LessThanDot - Friday the Thirteenths
Microsoft have announce details of project "Velocity", a distributed caching mechanism for .NET. The Velocity team describe it as:
"Velocity is intended to provide distributed caching (in memory) for all .NET applications – from enterprise scale to web-scale. We believe that there are many applications that need a distributed caching mechanism, and that there is, therefore, a need for distributed caching as a core part of the .NET platform. We expect to have more integrated support for this functionality with other parts of the .NET platform in our upcoming releases."
Velocity download details
Denis Gobo has just gathered a great selection of what he calls "a collection of frequently asked questions" and posted them in a new collection called SQL Server Programming Hacks. These include hacks from various categories such as:
* 1 NULLS
* 2 Dates
* 3 Sorting, Limiting Ranking, Transposing and Pivoting
* 4 Handy tricks
* 5 Pitfalls
* 6 Query Optimization
* 7 Undocumented but handy
* 8 Useful Admin stuff For The Developer
Check out the full list here:
This morning saw the official launch of LessThanDot, a new IT Community.
For more info on the site, please read my previous blog post on LessThanDot or come and visit us directly at LessThanDot.
The IT Community of the 21st Century: http://www.lessthandot.com