2007-01-04

OpenOffice.org still sucks, only a bit less

So it seems that OpenOffice.org 2.1, present in Ubuntu Feisty, finally has a native AMD64 executable, which should improve its memory requirements and make copy-paste less buggy. Unfortunately it seems you still are unable to insert cross-references to numbered items in enumerated lists, which is the technique of choice of MS Word users to insert bibliography references and lists. And of course creating a "Bibliography Database" is both non-trivial and very buggy. I tried it again but had to give up.

Thankfully I can still use LaTeX, which has much better quality anyway...

dijkstra in python

Given an arbitrary network, I knew that Dijkstra's algorithm computes the shortest path between any pair of nodes of the network. In a distributed routing protocol, Dijkstra is often used to compute shortest paths to destinations. I already knew, but wanted to confirm, that for any shortest path computed centrally from one edge node to another, you could apply the same Dijkstra algorithm to each intermediate node in the path and obtain the same result. So I put my Python coding skills to good use and created a small program that generates lots of random graphs with lots of nodes and lots of links with random "distances" and, for each such graph picks a couple of nodes and checks the assertion above. I only had to convert the Dijkstra algorithm expressed as pseudo-code in wikipedia to Python, which was pretty easy. The assertion is confirmed.
/me loves Python.

2007-01-01

GNOME CVS to Subversion migration

CVS is dead, long live Subversion!