Project Euler

Is a site dedicated to solving mathematical problems, you can check it out here.

People use a lot of different programming languages to solve the problems.

Here are the solutions to the first 40 problems in Python. Here are the first five in Ruby (I think). Finally here are some more different solutions in Python.

STATIC Variables

Interesting thread on the thinBasic forum about STATIC variables here.

PowerBASIC OOP Support

Support for Object-oriented programming is soon to be added to PowerBASIC.

Is that good news or bad?

Why not decide for yourself by reading this thread on the PowerBASIC forum?

There's another thread which may interest you here.

Panda3D - Free 3D Engine

I came across this thread on the Ubuntu forum today. It had originally been started way back in 2005 but recently someone had added a post to it.

Panda3D is a 3D engine for Python & it looks very promising, I haven't had time to try it out yet. But I'll post again when I've tried some of the examples.

IrfanView Download

IrfanView is an image viewer which can be downloaded from here. If you want to view even more image formats than I suggest you download the IrfanView plug-ins as well.

Search Engines

Here are some useful visual search engines.

• viewzi
• Cuil
• Searchme

Here is a link to metacrawler, which is a great search engine which uses other search engines to find information.

Help with Pointers

If you've just started using C or C++ you may need some help understanding what 'Pointers' are & how you use them. So here are some useful links.

• A discussion about pointers on the Ubuntu forum, here.
• An introduction to pointers, here.
• Another pointer tutorial here.
  

Linux Awk Example

Here is a 'Hello World!' example written using Awk in Linux. You can compare it to this example for Windows.

awk 'BEGIN { print "Hello world!" }'

Useful AWK Links

Here are some useful links which will help you in learning AWK.

• This is a link to the AWK page on Wikipedia.
• The GAWK manual is here.
• A link to a forum post which solved a problem I was having.
  

AWK Windows Examples

Okay, here's the first; a simple Hello world example.

awk "BEGIN { print \"Hello world!\" }"

The above program will print Hello world! on the screen.

Linux users should notice the use of double quotation marks at the beginning & end of the script. Also notice how the quotations in the braces have had to be 'cancelled-out' with backslashes.

If anyone wants to know why I've become interested in Awk, it was based on me reading this thread on the Ubuntu Forum.

AWK, GAWK, MAWK etc...

I'd been hearing about 'awk' for a longtime on the Ubuntu forum. It's a simple command-line tool that you can use for searching through text files. I've just downloaded the Windows version which can be found here.

The biggest difference between the Linux version & the Windows version so far has been in how you enter quotation marks for the tasks.

Single for Linux '
Double for Windows "

I'll try & post some usage examples later on.

Off Topic Post

Anyone like myself who has ever read any Erich von Daniken books or Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World, will have heard about the 'Antikythera Mechanism'. You can watch a very informative video about it here.

You can also watch a lot of the 'Arthur C. Clarke Mysterious World' television shows here.

Here is a full episode of the show which deals with strange crystal skulls & the Antikythera Mechanism.

Useful Java Fact

I was browsing through the Ubuntu Programming Forum today & found a very useful piece of information regarding the Java programming language.

Java only uses 32MB of RAM, if you need more you can specify it on the command line.

java -Xmx512m myClass

The above command will increase the memory available to your program to 512MB.

The forum thread where I found this information out can be found here.