All posts now have Disqus comment integration, so the few visitors this site has who aren't Russian bots can weigh in on my coding escapades. There's also pagination since I have over five posts now, and even an RSS feed! I've never seen a person actually use RSS in my life, but it's there.

So, I'm bad at Solitaire. Like, really bad. However, I'm good at writing code and just took an algorithms course this semester, so one afternoon I decided to make up for my complete lack of card game strategy with brute force. About twelve hours later, I had a working Klondike generator and solver. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to solve many initial states, but I'm not sure if that's because my code is bad or because the shuffling routine I use is just really good at making unsolveable decks.

Whatever the reason is, it's pretty fast at calculating moves due to a multithreaded architecture and a thread-safe priority queue that allows for a sort of hill-climbing algorithm. It often gets stuck in local maxima, though, but I think that's just due to the nature of Klondike.

On a related note, it's almost the 25th birthday of Windows 3.0, the first version of Windows to include the familiar card game. Happy birthday, you dinosaur.

The code is here.

I saw this comment on Reddit and decided to make it. Why? I dunno. Because I could, I guess.

While I was making this site, I discovered that Chrome has a bug with really tall gradients. The beveled corner effect I have on here is done like this:

.blog-post-outline {
	background: linear-gradient(135deg, transparent 15px, rgba(0,0,0,0.5) 0);
	padding: 5px;
}

.blog-post-content {
	background: linear-gradient(135deg, transparent 15px, white 0);
	padding: 15px;
	/* ... */
}

Chrome fails to actually render it when the div it's in is tall enough, instead just showing the standard 90 degree corner. To see what I mean, open up [this long post]({% post_url 2015-2-21-buddhabrot %}) in Chrome and look at the upper left-hand corner of the post. The sidebar and the excerpt on the homepage work fine because they're shorter. This Codepen demonstrates the issue as well. IE11 has no problem with it and while Firefox blurs the edge pretty badly, it does show up. The Chrome team has known about this for about two years now, but there's been no real progress since. I hope they fix it soon, but until then I'll have to find a workaround.

EDIT: Hey, they fixed it in July 2016 and I didn't notice!

So, if you haven't been able to tell from the sidebar already, I do a lot of stuff with fractals, for two reasons: first, they present a fun challenge to parallelize and can be incredibly satisfying to get working, and second, they make pretty pictures!

The second one was particularly important when I found the Wikipedia article on Buddhabrot one night about four years ago. I decided it looked so cool that I was gonna code it the very next day! A week later, I had a somewhat-working implementation written in Java (since it was the only language I knew at the time) using JOCL. It was fast, but the images it produced were downright garbage since I had zero knowledge of parallel programming other than "it made things faster".

Over this past winter break, I had a ton of time and nothing to do, so I decided to revive the project in C. I had just aced a parallel programming class, so I had the knowledge I lacked when I tried so long ago. I ended up pulling it off, learning a ton in the process.