It's a little pricey, but we're using this text in my Algorithm Design & Analysis class and I can truly say that it is the only CS textbook I've ever used that has been an absolute pleasure to work with.

http://www.amazon.com/Introduction-A...+to+algorithms

I like "The Algorithm Design Manual". It's split in two parts, part one has general stuff on algorithms and algorithm design and part two is a catalogue of typical problems and recommended algorithms. You can basically browse that compare to your problem and get inspired

Do you think hell be able get through it if he doesn't have math?

FWIW, I love this book, but certainly not the only CS book I've enjoyed.

How much math would you need? I've taken up through multivariable calc and linear algebra, though I wouldn't remember any of it at this point.

I've also taken AP comp sci in high school, so things like order n or log(n) are not new concepts.

Yeah I think know you'd be fine. Especially since you are learning this for your own needs and aren't going to have to reproduce rigorous proofs on an exam.

Yeah I didn't mean that as "this is the only pleasurable CS book out there." But out of the less than 10 I've had to use throughout school, this was the only one that wasn't completely atrocious, and in fact far from it.

And while we're on the subject of books: just got John Skeet's C# book yesterday.... Definitely not C# for n00bz =/

Man, I told you to not buy that book and use MSDN instead.

lol don't take offense! I've seen that book praised in so many different places, I figured your comment was just variance. The book isn't bad per se (I really can't tell), just not something I could jump right into being totally new to the language.

I have been using MSDN though =D

So far, I've thoroughly enjoyed SICP, Mathematics of CS, C: A Modern Approach, and Concrete Mathematics.

IMO, Cormen has very tough competition from that heap.

You hit my thoughts pretty good there. I've had the book for a while, but it is suffering an ill case of bit rot. Maybe my memory fails me, but I recall an utter lack of code, but that seems par for the course of all the C# / .Net books I've seen so far.

As the Amazon reviews like to point out: "Not for C# beginners."

Are there any recommendable tech/IT podcasts? Preferably about programming but I'll also take general IT trends, startup stuff or selfhelp (timemanagement and whatnot). Looking for something new to listen to on the train.

SICP is on my christmas list =D

I used to listen to thechangelog(.com). It's oriented towards Open Source, and was down for a while, but they're recording again now.

I also like The Cognicast, but it's mostly about clojure.

Did anyone else get screwed by the Java update to 7.45? They fixed a bunch of security issues (good) but didn't let any know (bad). We use a java web start to launch the application but have to use a dynamic jnlp. The solution I came up with would require all 10k users of the software to clear their cache, which would result in a huge headache for us. I am looking at jnlp template now.

As far as enterprise applications at large corporations, I think it is hard to beat Java as a language in that regards.

I can't upgrade Windows 8 -> Windows 8.1 because I've moved my "C:\Users" folder to "E:\Users" (to move it off the SSD). The 8.1 installer tells me "it can't install because either the Users or Program Files directory has been moved to another partition".

Somehow every other program on my machine manages to run thanks to environment variables like %USERPROFILE% and %APPDATA%.

GG.

Tried creating an empty "C:\Users" just for the upgrade? :P

One of my coworkers upgraded his machine to 8.1, but it broke because he didn't uninstall Start8 first. I told him to uninstall it but he didn't because he didn't want to break the system. Oops.

tl;dr: lol windows

This seems a little unfair - doing this tends to cause problems in most operating systems, including nearly all Linux distributions.

Waffle,

This may be too late, but the correct way to do this was:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS_volume_mount_point

lol? linux installers understand symlinks just fine and generally ignore /home anyway. which "doing this" are you referring to?

Having system directories in unexpected places? He didn't use symlinks or mount points - those things work fine in windows. If he wanted to mount a different partition at c:\Users that should have worked fine.

Here's the instruction for ubuntu:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Pa...ng/Home/Moving

For Windows:

http://grantcarmichael.blogspot.com/...nd-raid-1.html

Basically seems equivalent, no?

I used sysprep to change the <FolderLocations><ProfileDirectory> variable. The closest linux equiv I can think of is changing someone's homedir in /etc/passwd. If you change it to /mnt/anotherdrive/home/john, are you suddenly unable to upgrade ubuntu? no.

Check out the warning about FolderLocations here (lol): http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...=ws.10%29.aspx

When I get off work, I can try setting FolderLocations ProfileDirectory back to C:\Users\ after setting a mount point, I kinda doubt that will work though.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/libr...ded.60%29.aspx "The servicing stack does not handle cross-volume transactions, and it blocks upgrades."

No it's not, you're doing the equivalent of changing /home, not just /home/someuser. Don't do that. Even for the limited case of changing the home directory of root, I noticed that the answer is the same for Ubuntu:

http://askubuntu.com/questions/20985...tory-in-ubuntu

Don't do it.

And no this isn't supported in Windows:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/...tory?forum=mdt

This is the installer being stupid, but yes but installers randomly being spooked by non-standard settings is completely standard across operating system distributions. I couldn't even upgrade ubuntu from one relatively recent version to the latest without going through an intermediate version, not to mention the double upgrade breaking a bunch of repository settings and having to be fixed manually. And the whole upgrade was necessitated by some private repository being somehow set up only for a specific distribution despite not requiring anything that distribution. My Windows 7 is a lot older than the version of Ubuntu I had and everything works fine.

If you have weird deviations in system settings, do you expect Linux upgrades to pick that up exactly the way you intend? My experience is that, some settings get overwritten, some settings can preserved in a suboptimal way or one that prevents future programmatic changes and sometimes I get a asked a hundred questions I don't know how to answer and sometimes it silently does whatever it likes overwriting things. And don't get me started on the state of GNOME/KDE/Unity, etc. That's the state of computing today.

None of this is meant to be criticism of Ubuntu or whatever, but I'm surprised coming from the linux world, you guys aren't used to things breaking all the time. I love tinkering and making non-working things work so I don't mind this either way, but it's really strange to take Windows to task for breaking as a result of your tinkering when it's so much easier to tinker your way into a non-working system in Linux.

It's probably also easier to tinker your way out of most jams in Linux.

But mostly I just like to laugh at windows. I don't feel like you need a reason for that.

This depends but do you have any experience behind this or is this mostly hearsay? I did some sysadmin work in high school mostly maintaining Windows NT workstations and played with Linux since the early days of slackware and definitely followed both worlds closely, playing around with tons of installations along the way and I have no idea how they stack up in terms of "tinkering" your way out - usually, when you're ****ed, you're ****ed and a clean install is the least painful way. One super nice thing about Linux administration is that you can count on a bunch of standard scripting languages, but Windows has closed the gap here somewhat, though the culture of point-and-click really sucks.

Whatever dude, not sure why you care to post. It's not like I care about Windows one way or another - I'm a huge open source advocate - and I'm fluent with Linux and Windows and tons of tools for both (though right now for this project I'm working largely with Unix-ish tools ported to Windows and it's a bit of a pain setting everything up) but I do find it annoying when supposedly technical people are resorting to weird cliquish mentality with a pretense that it's based on something else.

Are there any good poker hand evaluators?

I have some PHP scripts that go through my HEM DB and reports stuff like flop equities. I've used the Pro Poker Tools command line but it is very slow.

I'm wondering if there is a fast/simple command line or source code hand evaluator.

Thanks.