Six Word Stories: Battery

The getaway car’s battery was dead.

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Minesweeper (Part 2)

Today, we take a first look at rendering our playfield. We find that a naive, UIView-based approach is unsatisfactory, and take a detour into the exciting world of vector graphics.

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Minesweeper (Part 1)

Let’s do a multi-day project: Let’s build Minesweeper for the iPhone. This should be pretty straight-forward, especially if we cut out a bell or whistle here and there. Let’s get started with some data structures.

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Six Word Stories: Extra

There were extra parts, after reassembly.

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20 Movies You Might Consider Seeing

  1. Berkeley in the Sixties
  2. The Big Sleep
  3. Camille
  4. Chungking Express
  5. Ed Wood
  6. Enigma
  7. The Fall
  8. High Noon
  9. The Killing
  10. The Last Days of Disco
  11. Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome
  12. Mulholland Dr.
  13. Mulholland Falls
  14. Othello
  15. Richard III
  16. Russian Ark
  17. The Shining
  18. Sunset Boulevard
  19. The Third Man
  20. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

(Not only is this not exhaustive, it isn’t even a “top 20”. It’s just a list of 20 movies I’d suggest that you see. And yes, those are affiliate links.)

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Calcudoku

If you like Calcudoku puzzles (i.e. Sudoku plus math), you might enjoy Patrick Min’s site. It’s updated with new puzzles regularly, and includes some interesting variants, such as multicell division and subtraction, modulo operators, 10×10 and larger puzzles.

Incidentally, my solver can’t handle all those options – it only goes up to 9×9, for one thing – but if there’s demand, I’ll see about adding those features.

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Six Word Stories: Immortality

“Sandwich, your name shall live forever!”

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OAuth

I’ve been working with Twitter’s OAuth interface. It’s pretty simple once you get the hang of it, but I found it a little fiddly at the outset. (If you get something subtly wrong It Just Doesn’t Work, and there’s no clear indication of what you got wrong.) There are a lot of good OAuth implementations out there – I found Jon Crosby’s OAuthConsumer very helpful – but I would have liked to have a minimal snippet of working code in hand when I started. Which is what I present today.

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Quickie: URL Encoding

Via simonwoodside.com: If you want to URL-encode a string, don’t use stringByAddingPercentEscapesUsingEncoding:

Use CFURLCreateStringByAddingPercentEscapes instead.

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Six Word Stories: Libel

Predictably, Dracula lost his libel suit.

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