Igor Ostrovsky on November 22nd, 2009

PDC 2009 was an exciting event, with announcements about Azure, Silverlight 4, and Office 2010 popping up one after another. For me, there was another reason why this year’s PDC was exciting – it was my first chance to present in a major conference.

Continue reading about Video of my PLINQ session at PDC 2009

Igor Ostrovsky on October 21st, 2009

Around two weeks ago, I found this email in my inbox, with the subject “Complaint about Robozzle”: Hi Igor Robozzle is really cute, I like it, but why on earth is it polluted with hundreds of invisible links to porn sites? From a guy like you I don’t expect to do such dirty things. pls […]

Continue reading about RoboZZle hacked, and 100+ sites are still compromised

Igor Ostrovsky on September 24th, 2009

Did you ever see one of those auto-generated random “academic papers” like this one? When I first saw the following title, my first thought was that it is a randomly-generated “paper”: Implications of the Turing completeness of reaction-diffusion models, informed by GPGPU simulations on an XBox 360: Cardiac arrhythmias, re-entry and the Halting problem [PDF] […]

Continue reading about Human heart is a Turing machine, research on XBox 360 shows. Wait, what?

Igor Ostrovsky on September 9th, 2009

Not many developers have the insights of Michael Abrash. He is a game developer with decades of experience building commercial games, including a game you may recognize as "Quake". His Graphics Programming Black Book is years old, but much of it is just as interesting as it was at the time of writing. And, the […]

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Igor Ostrovsky on August 30th, 2009

Over the past couple of years, auto-complete has popped up all over the web. Facebook, YouTube, Google, Bing, MSDN, LinkedIn and lots of other websites all try to complete your phrase as soon as you start typing. Auto-complete definitely makes for a nice user experience, but it can be a challenge to implement efficiently. In […]

Continue reading about Efficient auto-complete with a ternary search tree

Silverlight 2 is an awesome platform for development of rich web applications. One issue to be aware of, though, is that some browser features do not extend into Silverlight apps. For example, the Back and Forward browser buttons do not always work as the user may expect with Silverlight apps. The set of browser features […]

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Igor Ostrovsky on May 1st, 2009

It took significantly longer than I expected, but the RoboZZle demo video is finally on YouTube. The video made the reddit front page, so you can read the usual mixture of insightful, funny, and outright insane comments on the reddit page and the YouTube page. My favorite funny comment is this one: And finally, this is […]

Continue reading about My YouTube debut: a RoboZZle demo video

Igor Ostrovsky on April 14th, 2009

In database terminology, a view is a named query that typically aggregates data from multiple tables. When using views, it is important to remember that querying a view will evaluate the query that defines the view. Repeated evaluation of the view – say from within a nested query – may seriously impact or even kill […]

Continue reading about Precomputed view: A cool and useful SQL pattern

Igor Ostrovsky on April 1st, 2009

Notice that this post was published on April 1, 2009. For decades, computer science students have been taught that so-called NP-hard problems do not have known efficient solutions. These problems include the infamous Travelling salesman problem, subset sum, 3SAT, and many more. But – as is often the case – where theoretical Computer Science failed, […]

Continue reading about Choose expression: proposal for a revolutionary C# construct

Igor Ostrovsky on March 23rd, 2009

It’s now been a month since I launched RoboZZle, so it is a good time to reflect on how things went so far. It has been a great experience, and the project took up all of my free time and then some. For fun, I’ll discuss different aspects of RoboZZle and assign each a letter […]

Continue reading about The first month of my online game