In my PDC Day 3 post I mentioned how impressed I was with the Parallel Computing session. Ryan, Richard, and I are still talking about some of the stuff we saw and learned in that session. Daniel was kind enough to mention in the comments that the video from his PDC talk is now online. If you weren’t able to attend PDC or you didn’t make it to the session this is a must see video!
I also noticed on Daniel’s blog that he posted links to a video of an interview he did about parallelism at Tech Ed EMEA . This interview is a nice compliment to the PDC session as it reiterates some of the important points of parallel computing such as what parallelism is (as opposed to just multi-threading) and why it’s so critical to understand how to leverage the power of multiple cores today given the prospect that 32+ core machines will be standard in the not too distant future.
It’s inevitable that parallelism will become a critical aspect of software development in the future and it’s nice to see Microsoft doing some great work in this area bringing such a vital (and complex) technology to the mainstream.
.NET, Programming
parallel programming, parallelism, PDC 2008, Programming, video
In my previous DeScramble post I did an overview of the program’s UI. Now it’s time to see a video of the program in action!
However, I want to make a few things clear before you watch the video below.
- I have never used this program in any Scramble Live game with the exception of Cheater’s Ball. All the regulars in Cheater’s Ball know I have this program and have seen it in action.
- I have never used this program in any Scramble match. Just look at my record and that becomes obvious. Plus, all the people I play matches with know I have the program so it wouldn’t really fool anyone. Besides, actually playing the game with people is more fun.
- I wrote the program because it was an interesting challenge to me – My goal was not to make people think I am a better Scramble player than I am.
- After writing this program and watching it run against some of the better players in the game I have a whole new respect for how good those people really are. The speed at which they are able to find words on the board and enter them in is amazing!
So with that said, here is a short demo of DeScramble in action:
DeScramble, Programming
automation, cheat, DeScramble, Facebook, Programming, Scramble, video
Since C# 4.0 was introduced by Anders at PDC 2008 there has been a lot of buzz about the features that have been added to the language and why. Many people have questions about why something like dynamic static types needed to be added and what was the thinking behind such decisions. I have wondered along with everyone else about many of these questions. Thankfully channel9 has managed to get an interview with Anders and asked him to clarify some of the reasoning behind the decisions they hade with the language. Video is below:
C# 4.0 – Questions and reasons behind the answers
.NET, Programming
Anders, C#, C# 4.0, channel9, PDC, PDC 2008, Programming
About a month ago I wrote an introduction to DeScramble an application I wrote this summer to cheat at the Facebook game Scramble. In this installment I will introduce the UI and the basic functionality of the application. Below is a screenshot of the main UI and a description of what each element does:
- Game window finder – drag this target to the browser window that is running the Scramble game. This allows the program to grab the window handle that is later used to interpret the game board. In a future version I may attempt to try and find the window handle automagically but this works fine for now.
- Send Answers toggle – checking this option tells the program to send the answers to the game.
- Answer Speed slider – use this slider to change how fast the program sends the answers to the game. From my testing anything lower than about 40ms tends to choke the game UI.
- Auto Stop/Start toggle (bot mode) – checking this option tells the program to automatically start and stop the solver during live games.
- Burst Mode toggle – checking this option tells the program to send the first 3 answers to the game immediately and then send answers based on the indicated answer speed. This option is to ensure that when the scores are first posted that you have some points. This eliminates the “cheaters lag” effect that is noticed when people have to type the board into a solver.
- Solve/Stop Solve button – this button starts and stops the solver.
.NET, DeScramble, Programming
automation, cheat, DeScramble, Facebook, Programming, Scramble, UI
