The Twelve Days of Christmas

A good quiz question might be “How many gifts were given during the carol ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas'”. The answer, 364, might be known by a reasonable number of people by now, but let’s look at the problem both from this perspective, and another perspective: how many legs were in those gifts?
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Progress reports really do slow things down!

This is something I’ve known for quite a long time, but if you’re ever thinking “it’s not that much extra power to add progress reports”, just make a mental note of exactly how many progress reports you’re making, and try commenting them all out.

BeebMaze generated a new maze in mere seconds, but at the same time, that was seconds too long. As part of refactoring, I took out the progress reports with the intent of putting them back in, since there wasn’t that many.

It now generates a new maze in about the time it takes to paint the screen once. :D

(Download this build from the build server now: Build #18)

Multi-lingual interfaces for a website

One of the uni projects I’m doing is a Hotel Management system for “The Blackfish Hotel”, as part of the third-year group project. Part of this is an online booking system, where customers can book rooms in the hotel.

Our “customer”, the manager of the hotel, has asked for the website to have a version in Finnish as well as English, as apparently a large percentage of his customers are from Finland. This posed a challenging problem for us to solve… well… sort of.
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