Kernow 1.5.0.9 [beta] available

I've made a new beta version of Kernow available:

• XSLT directory transforms are now multi-threaded, with the size of the thread pool configurable in the options. For systems with multi-core processors and enough available memory this can really improve directory transform time.
• Single File / Standalone transforms now have a "Performance Testing" feature where the transforms are run repeatedly and the average time displayed.
• The panels can now be resized for the XQuery Sandbox tab. The fixed size XQuery Sandbox made it pretty useless before - at least now you can see more than four lines!
  
• Other minor bug fixes

There's loads still to do, but I'm trying to stick to the "release early, release often" policy.

UK Postcode Googlemaps mashup

Everyone else has done a mashup so I thought I should do one too. My mashup combines GoogleMaps with StreetMap.co.uk's GridConvert to get the nearest postcode for a given longitude and latitude. I had to use some server side PHP to get around cross domain scripting issues and to scrape the postcode from result HTML, but other than that it's all through the GoogleMaps API.

Sukoku Solver - much improved.

I've just uploaded the latest version of my Sudoku Solver.

I wrote the initial version of this in March 2006, and have since been in competition with Dimitre Novatchev to have the fastest solution. Dimitre's held that title for while, but with this version I think I may have won it back.

The additions here are Naked Tuple discovery in the first phase, and then repeatedly re-ordering the cells by least-number-of-possible-values as each cell is populated in the second phase. Sounds obvious but its something I missed first time around.

On my machine this latest version solves the vast majority of puzzles (including AI Escargot) in under a second, with the occasional one taking just under two seconds. The previous version would take up to a minute on some puzzles, so I'm pleased with improvement.

Hopefully Dimitre will do some comparisons using his latest version, and then tell me the good news :)

My new homepage

I'd like to draw attention to my new homepage: andrewjwelch.com. I've created this as a better place to store the code samples that were posted in this blog, and to link to my open source projects.

I'll try to keep news and opinions to this blog, and code samples on the homepage.

A long drawn out redundancy...

I've been informed that I will be made redundant... in October! That's a long 4 1/2 months away. In the mean time I'm meant to be performing maintenance and handover tasks (4 months of handover ?!?!) while the redundancy + retention carrot is tentatively dangled to keep us here until then...

So if you can see that far ahead and need a Java/XML/XSLT bod to fill a high paying contract, let me know :)