Gerund of cout

(cout as in C++'s printf())

"cout-ing" or "c-ing out"?

Bridge Crossing

There are four people who want to cross a bridge. They take 1, 2, 5 and 10 minutes, respectively. They're crossing at night, so, to cross, you need a lantern, and they have one between the four of them. The bridge is only wide enough to fit two people crossing at a time.

What's the floor on their crossing time? That is, what's the shortest possible time for them all to cross?

A Wonderful Puzzle

(thanks to Wendy for giving this to me)

You read in a stream of integers one by one. You don't know in advance how long the sequence will be, though, of course, you can recognize the EOF char when you get to it. You have to find which integer is the majority, where the majority is defined to be the integer that appears at least (n/2) + 1 times, where n is the length of the sequence.

Do it in constant memory. And, linear time, of course.

C Code, Run!

I saw this bumper sticker on a car last quarter on campus, co-incidentally when I was taking CS107 (the introductory C class). It's a pretty accurate description of how I was feeling during the write-a-heap-allocator assignment:

AppleJack 1.6 is out!

If you use a Mac, here's a nice little tidbit: AppleJack 1.6 is out (click on the post title for the link) . If you've never heard of it, AppleJack is a useful bug-fixing piece of software. Just start your computer up in single-user mode by holding down curlique-S (command-S) and type "applejack" at the prompt. It'll usually do a very good job of fixing whatever oddness is happening in your computer. It works especially well if Finder is acting up.

Google Silliness

Google searches on "recursion" and "anagram" result in interesting suggestions. Anyone know of any others?