Freecell Solver

I released version 2.0.0 of it. There are two very big things which I'd like to do with it now: add support for multiple threads to operate on the same states' collection, and port to Java. I'll do the former first, so I'll have a good code-base to translate into Java.

Otherwise than that, I'm also thinking of finding a way to abstract prunes without messing the code too much. But since Freecell Solver is fast enough as it is, it's in a rather low priority.

First-Come First-Served Readers/Writers Lock

I coded such a beast for POSIX threads and you can find it here. I did it mainly for fun and to see if the model I thought about for implementing it would work. It seems that it does.

I received some feedback about it from various people. Now I have an idea for improving it, so there will be a smaller number of condition variables that are allocated. But I'll release the current implementation as 0.2 before I do that.

Unfortunately, I'm not going to use such a mechanism for Freecell Solver's multi-threading capabilities. The reason is that the atomic operation of managing the states collection is of checking if a state exists and if not adding it. (and returning whether it was the case). That way, a mutex is enough.

Humanity

I added an incomplete scene called "The Street". It has a lot to do with Computer Science, so I recommend hackers to read it.

The Technion

After having to do 5 exercises in "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs", I won't be surprised if I'll start dreaming in parenthesis. During the last lecture, I managed to correct the lecturer on one occasion. Read about it in this post I made to Hackers-IL.

In case, I did not mention it here earlier, I'm writing the answers in English and using LaTeX. It's very convenient and causes much less trouble and frustration than Word. I discovered that one should write {\tt My text} instead of \tt{My text}. LaTeX is not without its idiosyncrecies, but at least one becomes familiar with them eventually, which is not the case with MS-Word.

Other than that, I stopped studying "Digital Communications". The lecturer and the T.A. were great and the material was very interesting, but the homework took too much time. And after I worked in the summer on the project, I'd like to have a light semester.