TomSwitzer.com Tom Switzer's Blog

This program demonstrates 4 different approximate cell decomposition path finding methods. In particular, it demonstrates basic grid decomposition, Quadtree decomposition, hierarchical rectangloid decomposition, and probabilistic cell decomposition. I wrote this program for a 1 semester class, of which it was only a part. Because of this, I wrote much of it under a sever time constraint, so don't expect a whole lot of documentation. The source code is, of course, available (under the LGPL).

Even 8 months after its launch, some people still seem convinced the Wii is just a Gamecube 1.5 with a gimmick of a Wii-mote. But the Wii is still selling faster then they can stalk the shelves with them. The Wii is a success. So, what has made it a success? The Gamecube wasn't a success, so a Gamecube 1.5 can't expect much better. Therefore, it's logical to conclude the only thing that is making the Wii a success is the Wii-mote. So, once everyone "gets over" the Wii-mote, the Wii's popularity will sharply decline, right? I don't think so. The Wii is more then just a sum of its hardware and software. Here is some of what the Wii offers on top of the Wii-mote.

After reading through the comments here, I just got fed up with people's definition of "freedom" and silly arguing. Freedom is the author's freedom to choose how they license their software; whether that be GPLv2, GPLv3, BSD, etc, or just closing it up! The most important freedom is the authors right to chose how their own work is copied. I think it's great so many people choose to license their code under open source licenses. I think sometimes we lose sight of the fact that there is this amazing open source community that shouldn't be taken for granted. Instead, we waste time bickering over who is better by some subjective definition of free.

So, after a serious session of web browsing, I found myself at the CakePHP web site. I had just finished reading an article on it, and wanted to check it out. So I went to the downloads section and was a little startled at first when I was greeted with a page that appeared to have no "download" links, but telling me I should donate. After about 10 seconds of frantic searching I figured out one of the donate buttons up top was "No Thanks," so I clicked and managed to find my way to the download. Not, however, without first getting just a wee shot of guilt from the developers of CakePHP.

I want to post something, so I'll post this little piece of code I made in php. I created a little "Pluralizer" (try the pluralizer here). It's very simple; it takes a singular noun, then returns it's plural. It's based on the algorithm by Damian Conway. See his paper, An Algorithmic Approach to English Pluralization. You can download the source here. The tarball contains:

Well, it seems like everyone today has a blog, so I decided I would get one too. I went out and got Drupal. It seems to be a good piece of software, though I've only used it for about 10 minutes.

I'm hoping to keep the content here actually useful. Since I'm a computer science student, and my favourite pass-time is programming, chances are 80% of the posts will be about programming, so if this isn't what your interested in, keep going!