If you’re going to use the web to perform a survey of your customer base, this report on a similar project from American Express should serve as a cautionary tale.

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For the last few months I’ve been up to my eyeballs in algorithms – school, work, writing, you name it. In honor of the often puzzling topics I’ve been working on, here’s a little crossword with an algorithms theme. The java applet that lets you solve online has a bit of lameness, but it’s not [...]

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Hi loyal readers, I’m doing a little background research for an article on music downloads, and as a result, need some people to fill out a survey. The goal of the survey is to get a little background on people’s attitudes, plus a comparison of differences in attitudes between old people (me) and young people [...]

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Yes, the New York Times is with it. So much so that they can pull off an ironic headline in full belief that they and their equally hip readers will all get the joke when they read this article. Patent Owner Sues the Internet We salute you, Gray Lady! Actually Well, it’s always fun to [...]

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Angie’s List is a web site that allows consumers to see ratings on local service companies, such as plumbers, remodelers, electricians, and so on. All ratings are subscriber driven, and Angie’s List seems to make most of their revenue from the $5.95/month subscriber fee they charge – an anomalous revenue model in today’s web. I [...]

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Exceptions are a necessary part of the C++ language, but for most programmers they are worse than worthless – they are unusable. When exceptions were first added to the language back in the days before standardization, they were seen as a brilliant improvement over the hideous setjmp/longjmp facility from ANSI C. Because exceptions unwind the [...]

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Dr. Dobb’s PortalNovember, 2007 Article on DDJ site As I’ve confessed in the past, I’m a sucker for word puzzles. My recent post on a Will Shortz puzzle from NPR Morning Edition ended up provoking a surprising amount of comment, much of it in the vein of Watch me solve it better, faster, and with [...]

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Visa’s web advertising is sadly misguided – it seemed to be aimed at investment bankers and executives. I’d like to think that the majority of the people actively using the web are from a different category – one I’ll call the Z-axis.

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Chances are good that you don’t know who Richard Platt is. Richard was never in the business of self-promotion – had he been, he could have been a household name among the cognoscenti. But Richard didn’t spend his time talking to the press, speaking at conferences, or teeing up with the titans of industry. His [...]

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Dr. Dobb’s PortalSeptember, 2007 Article on DDJ site Finding the Convex Hull of a set of points is an interesting problem in computational geometry. It is useful as a building block for a diverse set of applications, including thing such as: Collision detection in video games, providing a useful replacement for bounding boxes. Visual pattern [...]

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