Graham Wheeler's Random Forest

Stuff about stuff

Monkeying Around

After a huge storm blew up, the ship foundered. Dawn’s light found just six survivors washed up on a desert island – five men and one monkey. The men spent the day gathering all the food they could find – which was just a pile of coconuts. After a dinner of coconut milk and flesh, the exhausted men decided to they would divide the remaining coconuts up the following day, before splitting up and exploring the remainder of the island.

Posted by Graham Wheeler on Sunday, December 13, 2009

The End of the Universe

In the Indian city of Benares, beneath a dome that marks the center of the world, is a brass plate in which are set three diamond needles, each as thick as a bee and a cubit high. At the time of creation Brahma placed on one of these needles 64 disks of pure gold, each a different size, each resting only on plates of a larger size (so the largest disk was at the bottom and the smallest at the top).

Posted by Graham Wheeler on Sunday, December 13, 2009

Fixing Grub after installing Windows 7

I have an MSI Wind on which I run both Windows 7 and Ubuntu. I rarely use the latter but I like to keep it around and with a 320GB hard drive its affordable. I have used both the Windows BCD loader and GRUB as my bootloader at various times (and for those using BCD I highly recommend EasyBCD as the way to configure it). Most recently I’ve been using GRUB.

Posted by Graham Wheeler on Saturday, May 16, 2009

GeoRSS and Live Search for Mobile

Hopefully by now you all have v3.0 of the Live Search client, and are enjoying the new features (web search, weather, and collections). I’d like to talk about collections in this post, but first it is worth mentioning a couple of changes in this version that are less obvious, and overcome limitations I have blogged about in the past: we now have Outlook contact integration. From Outlook contacts you can select the “Show on Map” menu option to map a contact.

Posted by Graham Wheeler on Friday, June 6, 2008

Cute Math Curiosity

I heard this proof a couple of days back and thought it was fun and elegant. If you draw a circle anywhere on the surface of the earth there will be at least two opposite points that have the same temperature. The proof relies on Bolzano’s theorem, which is an instance of the Intermediate Value Theorem. Bolzano’s theorem says that if a continuous function defined on an interval is sometimes positive and sometimes negative, it must be 0 at some point.

Posted by Graham Wheeler on Tuesday, May 6, 2008

The Art of Assert

“Assertions are the only reliable form of program documentation” (Charles Hoare) While I wait for the next release of Live Search for Mobile, I will fill in the time with some posts on tricks I have used in the dim and distant past, before I became a mostly C# programmer. I love C#, but I really don’t like the way the C/C++ preprocessor was not included. While preprocessors can be abused, they are also extremely useful (think of __FILE__ and __LINE__, just for starters).

Posted by Graham Wheeler on Friday, May 2, 2008

Last Day on Live Search for Mobile

Today is my last official day on the Live Search for Mobile team. I am moving over to a new team working on some incubating new mobile initiatives in emerging markets (as a South African ex-pat I can relate to this). It has been a fun ride and it is hard to let go of the Windows Mobile client which I think of as ‘my baby’ (with co-parent Ashley). There is still so much to do.

Posted by Graham Wheeler on Sunday, April 20, 2008

Why There Are no ARCO Gas Prices

We get gas price data from a 3rd party provider. They in turn get the data from credit card companies. ARCO does not accept credit cards. This is a great example of where user-contributed data would be valuable, and I hope that one day we will be able to extend the feature to include that.

Posted by Graham Wheeler on Saturday, April 12, 2008

We're Hiring!

My team is hiring. The job descriptions are below. PM me if you’re interested: Windows Live Mobile Search team is focused on delivering outstanding search and local navigation experience on mobile devices. Our goal is to put the power of Windows Live Services right in your pocket. We own creating addictively useful experiences for folks trying to search from their cell phones. Our mission is to get every one of the mobile queries.

Posted by Graham Wheeler on Thursday, April 10, 2008

The Windows XP "Upgrade"

I have had all the PCs in our house on Vista since Vista RTMed. This includes my kids computers, and I like the Vista parental controls (although I wish they were more comprehensive, combining not only allowed hours of use but quotas as well). I recently wanted to run my old copy of the game Creatures, and could not get it to install on Vista. This was sufficiently frustrating that I decided to switch one PC back to XP.

Posted by Graham Wheeler on Tuesday, March 25, 2008