Author Archives: dclements

Recently I had a phone interview where I got asked a variety of Java questions. This kind of thing is standard, and most of the questions were somewhat standard: Subscribe to the comments on this post

Working on Project Euler, there is a problem involving dice probabilities. The forum shows a variety of different solutions, some of them involving entirely too much typing (several people literally iterated through every possible combination of dice faces), and some … Continue reading →

One of the final steps in developing your app before submission is adding an icon. This is a straightforward process: Create a 57×57 pixel PNG, name it “Icon.png”. In must be exactly 57×57 pixels and it must also be a … Continue reading →

The game of Go involves a ranking system to allow people at different levels of strength to play fair games. The system is widely employed in both in-person and online games, and some variation of it is used by every … Continue reading →

A graph of Bush’s approval rating over the last 8 years. The line represents a 5-day rolling median for his rating, which ranged between 90 and 23. Subscribe to the comments on this post

Sometimes it is useful to see what malloc operations have been performed by a given application. Doing this is a fairly straightforward process that can be facilitated with the command malloc_history, but requires a little bit of setup for iPhone-specific … Continue reading →

…sign up to get paid tons of money to make statistical fallacies? There is a fallacy I like to refer to as the “clifford fallacy” that the news media seems particularly prone to making: “If this dog keeps growing at … Continue reading →

In the Java programming language there are both raw and wrapper objects to represent numbers. For example, int and Integer, double and Double, etc. If one wanted to add a numeric object to a Collection object, it required using the … Continue reading →

One of the really powerful libraries available to C++ programmers is the Standard Template Library (STL). While Cocoa has fantastic built-in classes, sometimes it is beneficial–especially when working with algorithms where raw numbers are being used and speed is more … Continue reading →

One thing that developers who are new to Objective-C will notice immediately are the number of null keywords. We have a choice of: nil Nil NULL Under the hood there isn’t much difference between these (as of this writing they … Continue reading →