Codeworx Design Studio / Dev

2007-01-04T18:08:00.000-08:00

Solutions to the Cracker Barrel Puzzle

I was very happy to check my email the other night and find that my blog had received its very first comment. The comment was from someone asking for the solution to the Cracker Barrel Puzzle, so I’ve decided to publish all the solutions that I found when I wrote the program.

Now as a little background you must understand how to interpret the solutions, so start off by marking your puzzle as shown in the diagram below:

The reason is because there are 36 potential “moves” that are listed below:

124, 136, 247, 259, 358, 36A, 456, 421, 47B, 48D, 58C, 59E, 631, 6AF, 654, 69D, 742, 789, 853, 89A, 952, 987, A63, A98, B74, BCD, C85, CDE, DEF, D96, D84, DCB, E95, EDC, FA6, FED

For example the first rule “124” should be read: “golf tee in hole 1 should jump over tee 2 and land in hole 4”. Once you understand these rules you can quickly work through the solution.

The solution file for download contains just over 13,000 solutions in the following format:

15: DEF,69D,259,742,D84,FA6,247,36A,BCD,A98,D84,742,124,

The first number is the hole to leave a golf tee out of. In this case it should be hole 15 or on our board, hole F (15 hex is F). From that point you can work through the steps DEF, 69D, etc until you only have 1 golf tee left.

The solution file is available for download here: http://www.codeworxdesign.com/bkn/Sol-Output.txt

Enjoy working through the solutions and thank you for the comment, I encourage everyone to leave a comment and ask a question, make a suggestion or issue a challenge…

~ Bobby

2006-12-30T04:33:00.000-08:00

Cross Domain AJAX Calls and the RSS Reader

Just the other night I sat down and decided to write an RSS reader that could be easily embedded into a web page. My plan was to use AJAX to pull the news feed and display it. I had just finished up another AJAX test project the week before and so I decided to use the Prototype library. Everything seemed very simple, I completed the code to download the feed and display the top 5 or so headlines in a nice little box. I even had a nice little spinny while the feed was downloading.

Just when I thought I was finished I opened the reader in Firefox and that is when my fun first started. The reader wasn’t working! I checked my code, I checked the Firefox console and there were no errors. Thinking it might have been a problem with Prototype I reverted back to some AJAX code that I had used before and re-wrote the reader to use it. Same issue except this time I was getting a security error in the console. A quick Google revealed an unfortunate issue. Firefox did not allow cross domain calls, meaning because the call was not coming from the same domain it is considered a security concern. I did find some code that you could add that would force Firefox to ask whether the user wanted to download the feed, but knowing that it would cause concern for most users, I decided to cut my losses and just display a nice message stating Firefox was not supported at this time.

Thinking I was complete I loaded it onto a test server and went for a look-see. Hmmm, no feed! Looking at the bottom of my IE I see the all so familiar error page icon indicating that I had a scripting error and sure enough, I get the message, permission denied….

Doing a little more research on the cross domain AJAX issue I realized that IE had the same security restrictions when attempting a call on a remote server versus running the content and making the call locally which I had been doing with Stresser and the RSS Reader. This was very frustrating and so now I was trying to figure out how to salvage the work I had done.

Unfortunately, I did not find a “clean” way around the cross domain issue and so I was forced to use a different method. The new method involved creating a server side page that would download the RSS feed, parse it and create a JavaScript file that could be included by the user.

A most fun night…

~ Bobby

2006-12-17T10:46:00.000-08:00

CODE POST: Stresser (Web Application Load Utility)

A couple weeks ago I was presented with the challenge of testing load on a particular web application and I needed a tool to do nothing but generate page requests. I had been playing with various JavaScript libraries such as Prototype, Moo FX, Script.aculo.us and decided I would try to create a basic web application that used AJAX to generate a number of random asynchronous calls to a web application.

I ended up choosing Prototype, and although in the past I had created my own AJAX code, the Prototype library made it surprisingly simply. I looked over the documentation for Prototype and within minutes I had modeled the framework for my stress tool in just a few lines of code.

The rest was just the basics and although not the most elegant code it was functional and the premise behind "Stresser” was simple. You specify a URL that you want to send HTTP requests to and specify what parameters you want passed. I kept the parameters in what I called a "Parameter Bank” and once you specified the interval it would send a new request you could begin generating traffic. To ensure there was some feedback as to whether the result had changed, I used Paul Johnston’s Javascript MD5 implementation to hash the results and output the size.

Always a fan for writing things from the ground up I must admit I was impressed and sold with the easiness of using the Prototype JavaScript Library. I recommend you check it out.

Prototype (http://prototype.conio.net/)

I would also recommend that you check out Script.aculo.us which has some very nice effects (some of which we recently used on the Codeworx Design Site.

Script.aculo.us – (http://script.aculo.us/)

To download the code for Stresser you can visit:

http://www.codeworxdesign.com/bkn/Stresser-SRC.asp

2006-11-28T18:05:00.000-08:00

As always I try to post at least once a week to talk about some of the buzz around the Codeworx Design Studio Development Department. Today I’m happy to talk about a new service launched called Hardin County Pages Classifieds. This is a simple service we are offering to the community of Hardin County, Kentucky to post items for sale. The service is totally FREE and we already have several listings! From a development perspective we will be improving the system over the next couple weeks to streamline listing and such, but if you have something to sell, post it on the classifieds: http://www.hardincountypages.com/classifieds/listings/submit.htm.

~Bobby

2006-11-21T19:39:00.000-08:00

The design department is working feverishly on projects this week, but I wanted to take a moment to briefly talk about a great new product from Codeworx Design Studio called Easy Edit. The product launched on Sunday, November 19th and is going to be the first in a long line of services and products geared toward making web site owner’s lives easy.

The premise is very simple; we wanted a basic way for web site owners to make changes to their content because we find very often that web site owners are tied to their web design companies paying high fees to make simple changes. As a business we made a decision that this is NOT the way we wanted to make our money as a company and that we wanted to spend our time designing and building systems for our clients that would bring more value. For a small business every dollar is crucial…

In line with the launch of Codeworx Easy Edit, the Design Dept. put together a nice front page spread (A big Woo Hoo! to the Design Team!).

If you get time please check out our Easy Edit Demo, give it a try and please provide us feedback, we love to get user feedback and hear ways to make the products and services we create better and easier to use.

~ Bobby

Please remember, as a legal disclaimer, that my views are not to be considered the views of Codeworx Design Studio, Inc.

2006-11-15T18:10:00.000-08:00

FREE Microsoft E-Learning

If you've been reading your MCP Flash then you know about a lot of the great offers from Microsoft, I figured I would pass this FREE offer along to everyone:

Dig Deep and Go Further with Microsoft SQL Server 2005
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/sql2005/digdeep/default.mspx

Enjoy!

~Bobby

2006-11-14T20:59:00.000-08:00

Creative Representation of Problems

I had originally thought about speaking about a topic more close to home and more about Codeworx Design Studio as a business, but for a variety of reasons, I’m going to instead talk about a different topic with regards to programming in general.

Just this past week alone I found myself preaching a couple times about the importance of being able to represent problems. This was one of the earliest things I was taught by one of my favorite college professors (Professor. Robert Lamphere). Mr. Lamphere was big on representation and while talking with him about various problems & solutions, it actually opened my eyes to other ways of looking at things beyond how I was already representing problems. In my opinion, great programmers possess the skill of representation; I believe this goes to the fundamental skill of creative problem solving. And so as I talk to developers early in their career, I always try to talk about creative representation of problems.

An example that I like to use and which I will talk about here is what I call the “Cracker Barrel Puzzle”. For those who don’t live around Elizabethtown, KY, hopefully you have heard of a restaurant called Cracker Barrel. One of the things that I always liked about Cracker Barrel was that they had these puzzles on each of their tables which consisted of a triangle with 15 holes. In 14 of the holes were golf tees, and the object of the puzzle was simple, try to leave as few golf tees as possible by “jumping” other golf tees. And the term “jumping” follows the rules of jumping in checkers, in order to “jump” another tee, the destination hole had to be free.

One day I was curious how many combinations there were to this puzzle, so I decided to write a program designed to solve the puzzle. After some thought, I determined that instead of trying to represent the program as a shape, perhaps using some kind of array or structure that could “visually” represent the puzzle. The puzzle could be represented as a single string of 15 hex characters and that every move possible could be represented by only 36 rules (each rule defined as 3 hex characters: starting, jumped, destination). By representing the program in this manner, I was able to create a fairly straightforward program that tested various conditions for these 36 rules and ultimately find the combinations that resulted in only 1 golf tee being left on the board.

Ultimately, I ended up finding thousands of solutions and at one point I dumped them all into a database and tried to determine which starting point on the puzzle board produced the most results. With the information I had gathered, what I designated as hole 13, seemed to have the most solutions possible.

But again, the point here is that by representing a problem in a different manner, you are most of the time able to take something that while at first may seem hard and break it down into easier steps. So remember this next you have a creative problem to solve. Try to get inspiration from things around you. I try to model what I can off of nature (bee flight, leaf patterns, rain drops, etc) as it seems that in the world of nature, there is a system which apparently works, but then again, don’t rule out things more mechanical and man made, I remember Mr. Lamphere once talking about using gears as a method of representation where one part of the representation was a small gear and the other part a large gear and the intersection or point at which the teeth of the gears met could potentially be a solution?

~ Bobby

2006-11-07T17:34:00.000-08:00

FREE Add-In for Microsoft Retail Management System (MS RMS) (Open Source)

RMSPOExport is a simple utility for exporting purchase order information to a text file. Simply enter the connection information for your RMS database and RMSPOExport will display a list of PO’s you are able to export. A search feature is available to search for PO by PO Number and you can specify what format you would like to use for exporting data. A great utility for exporting purchase order information to excel.

The following data columns are available for export:
PONumber
POTitle
ItemLookupCode
ItemDescription
QtyOrdered
SupplierName
ReorderNumber
Cost

This program is provided for FREE “as is” with no warranty or support.

You can download the installation program at: http://www.codeworxdesign.com/bkn/rmspoexport-install.asp

You can download the source code at:
http://www.codeworxdesign.com/bkn/rmspoexport-src.asp

2006-10-29T18:12:00.000-08:00

Firefox DIV Layer Issues

Working on a project recently, I ran across what appears to be a DIV layering issue while testing a web application in Firefox (specifically version 1.5.0.7). The project required using a DIV as a kind of menu bar and in this particular case I had to use absolute positioning to position it. What I observed was that when the “menu bar” DIV was visible, that it was not possible to click anything on the page “below” the DIV.

I searched the internet and found people with the same issues, but found no solutions other than “avoid absolute positioning”… I tried a few things, but ultimately stumbled upon on the solution. Check out the examples below:

This is an example of the issue.


<html>
 <head>
  <style type="text/css" media="all"> 
   .absdiv
   {
   position: absolute; top: 0px; bottom: 0px; left: 0px; right: 0px; 
   }
  </style>
 </head> 
 <body>
  line 1 
  <br>line 2
  <br>line 3
  <div class="absdiv">
   <table>
    <tr><td>test</td></tr>
   </table>
  </div>
 </body>
</html>

Oddly enough, this sample did not have the DIV layering issue. Meaning, that it only happens when you have a table inside of the DIV. Very Interesting.


<html>
 <head>
  <style type="text/css" media="all"> 
   .absdiv
   {
   position: absolute; top: 0px; bottom: 0px; left: 0px; right: 0px; 
   }
  </style>
 </head> 
 <body>
  line 1 
  <br>line 2
  <br>line 3
  <div class="absdiv">test</div>
 </body>
</html>

The solution to the issue was as simple as specifying a height for the DIV!


<html>
 <head>
  <style type="text/css" media="all"> 
   .absdiv
   {
   position: absolute; top: 0px; bottom: 0px; left: 0px; right: 0px; height: 12 ;
   }
  </style>
 </head> 
 <body>
  line 1 
  <br>line 2
  <br>line 3
  <div class="absdiv">
   <table>
    <tr><td>test</td></tr>
   </table>
  </div>
 </body>
</html>

This is certainly something to remember the next time you’re working with layering DIV’s.

~ Bobby

2006-10-23T18:00:00.000-07:00

I will often change my desktop wallpaper at least twice a week (when I'm home) and I'm becoming fond of flickr (http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/?). It is very easy to spend a small amount of time looking at the various photos uploaded by people around the world.

Captured in these photos are the essence of life, the soul of a moment in time sealed forever in a photograph. The vivid colors of sun rays on a brilliant tulip, the deep blue sky over the ocean, the smile of a beautiful child...

It is important that as developers we find a place for inspiration... [incomplete].

2006-10-19T22:07:00.000-07:00

Tonight I submitted a utility I wrote for Microsoft Navision to the Mibuso (http://www.mibuso.com/) website for inclusion in their directory. Hopefully they will post it!

You can view the description of the utility below:

SQL Clustered Index Fix is a utility that I wrote to fix the SQL Clustered Index Issue for a Navision 4.0 SP1 database. It is not implemented in C/AL but Visual Basic 6 working directly at the SQL Server level. This inherently means that Navision will not report the indexes as clustered, but as long as any changed objects are re-indexed it should not be an issue.

This utility has only been safely executed on Navision 4.0 SP1 databases running on SQL Server 2000.

It is recommended that you download the latest MDAC before using this utility:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?DisplayLang=en&FamilyID=6c050fe3-c795-4b7d-b037-185d0506396c

If you are interested in downloading the utility, you can get a copy at the following link:
http://www.codeworxdesign.com/bkn/sqlclusterfix-install.asp

If you are curious about the source code, you can get a copy at the following link:
http://www.codeworxdesign.com/bkn/sqlclusterfix-src.asp

I know some people will be interested why I chose to write the utility in VB6 vs. C/AL. And the main reason is because I am currently only learning the C/AL language. I can modify and work with pre-existing code and even write some code if I have examples and such, but the Clustered Index Fix was derived out of necessity and I felt most comfortable using VB6.

As a note, when this program was executed against a production system with a > 40 GB database it took roughly 4 hours to cluster the indexes.

If you experience any issues with the program, please feel free to contact me by leaving a comment.

~ Bobby

2006-10-19T20:32:00.000-07:00

It has been a very interesting and busy week and I’m trying to stick to a goal of posting at least something every few days. I normally don’t watch much TV and spend most of my free time reading and programming, but I had the pleasure of coming across a TV show on KET called “Buffett and Gates - Go Back to School”. The show was a recording of a group of finance students who would ask various questions to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates.

If nothing else, it was very inspiring. As a young entrepreneur of a startup, I think it’s important to have role models in the business world and for the most part we at Codeworx Design Studio try to model ourselves after Google. For those who know me, they know that up until recently I highly favored the Partner business model of Microsoft, but as I’ve done more reading and discussion regarding Google, I think our company’s views on innovation align more towards Google’s.

But as I listened to the TV program it became very apparent that there are some key characteristics of successful entrepreneurs. The first being, they follow their passion... I believe it was Mr. Buffett who specifically mentioned the importance of following your passion, and I think that is something that many people do NOT do and especially with a business, if you are not passionate about your product(s) or service, you will most likely fail.

The second characteristic of successful entrepreneurs and people in general is surrounding yourself with smart people. Marissa Mayer (of Google) in her speech on innovation talks about her “Laura Beckman Theory” (boy, I hope I spelled that right) And the concept of if you work with people better than you, then your intelligence will raise. I think the opposite of this theory is true as well, if you surround yourself with people of lesser skill and are susceptible, then ultimately they will bring you down, which is what I refer to as the “bucket of crabs” theory, based off a similar theory from the movie “Romeo must Die”.

But this of course does not mean that in every instance working with lesser people will bring you down, because kind of the third and fourth characteristics of successful people are the ability to independently think and make your own decisions. Perhaps one of my favorite moments in the program was when a student asked Mr. Buffett who he referred to when he needed assistance… and he jokingly stated that he looks in the mirror… :) He further elaborated and talked about his business partner as a potential source for assistance, but ultimately in order to blaze your own trail, you must be able to think independently. And when coupled with the fourth characteristic, which is the ability to strategize, I think you ultimately either succeed in doing something unique, or you fail greatly.

The last major point that I took from the TV program was concerning Mr. Buffett’s definition of a successful person, which is that “you have lived a good life if the people who you wanted to love you, do…”. I think this is a very interesting statement and when listing to Mr. Buffett about the importance of being able to get the most out of people and then also applying it to the concepts of work and home balance, it is quite profound.
It reminds me of a quote that I had tried to live my own life by:

“To laugh often and love much; to win the respect of intelligent persons and the affection of children; to earn the approbation of honest citizens and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to give of one’s self; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to have played and laughed with enthusiasm and sung with exultation; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived—this is to have succeeded”

- Bessie Anderson Stanley

On my own internal scorecard of life, I have my own measures of success, and am no means complete or successful (with the exception of my intelligent and beautiful wife, who I am most blessed to be with), but I did want to share most importantly Mr. Buffett’s last statement because it shows that although you may be successful in business, does it matter if your unsuccessful as a human?

~ Bobby

Please remember, as a legal disclaimer, that my views are not to be considered the views of Codeworx Design Studio, Inc.

2006-10-09T17:36:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Codeworx Design Studio Development Blog!! I'm hoping to make this blog a place where I can post code samples (both my own and from the net) and talk about some of the new and exciting things going on in the Codeworx Design Studio Development Department. The past few weeks have shown tremendous growth as we re-focus our efforts to other initiatives.

In the development area, we are working towards getting more Web 2.0 friendly, taking a deeper look into the implementation of AJAX, and continued use of best practices.

Before Codeworx Design Studio was born, we actually used to write custom desktop applications and even today we will still develop an application here or there and I hope to post soon on a new application with code samples as to how we did it.

Stay tuned!