I like a clean and tidy C:\, I bet you do too.

When you install Microsoft-Office it drops a directory called MSOCache on the root of your drive. Like you’ve guessed this is cache for the Microsoft-office-installation so that you don’t need to tell it where your installation is located.

If MS Coders would have bothered to hide it somewhere under application-data or something like that I wouldn’t even have noticed, but such a blunt disregard of my craze for tidiness deserves a response.

Apparently I’m far from being the first to notice, this little MS tool allows you to get rid of the bastard.

Bastard of a mouse OR how my mouse tried to commit suicide on a shiny day.

I got an MS-IntelliSense Optical Mouse about two years ago.
Recently, it decided to sorta stop working. It didn’t just stop all of a sudden, it worked fine for ten minutes, stopped for short 3 seconds break, and so forth.

That’s the kind of behavior that tests your nerves, and when your nerves are tested every 10 minutes, it can’t be good. You see, you’re working on something, and all of a sudden BOOM… NOTHING, so you have 2-3 seconds to contemplate ‘what’s wrong, why is it not working, what could be wrong, WHOOPS its back again, lets continue working‘.

Sort of like a distorted reality, you only get to think about the damned mouse for a few seconds every ten minutes, it takes time to reach conclusions that way.

Nevertheless, conclusion struck this afternoon. I kept thinking it was the USB connector but alas I found that the part of the cable coming out of the mouse was very sensitive to bending. Once you bent it too much, BOOM the mouse goes away, this time you can sit and think about it because you need to bend it back for if you want to start working again.

Took apart the damned mouse, thanks Microsoft for hiding the screws under glued plastic parts, and THANK YOU FOR SCREWING THEM SO HARD that I broke a screwdriver trying to screw them out.

I had to cut the USB cable in that part and re-attach it, I put the re-attached part into the mouse itself so that it doesn’t get any movement, let’s see how long this holds…

To top things up with some jelly and peanut-butter, once I closed things up the left button started acting strange, didn’t feel that responsive… Now what are you suppose to do ?
It’s like when something’s broken, and you fix it, only to discover that your understanding of what went wrong was comparable to your knowledge of Indian bureaucracy (this doesn’t apply to the 1 Billion Indian ppl out there, sorry). I just went in to cut/attach the cable, how in the world am I suppose to know why the Left button is starting a mutiny on me ?
I just hit it pretty hard and it looks like it works… for now.

This is what I like to call ‘A Bastardization of a Mouse’

Here’s some straight-to-the-point source-code for solving and generating Sudoku boards.
It’s targeted at embedded systems, so stuff will run fast and memory consumption is rather low.

I’m putting it here mainly so that people can find it through google and have some of the Sudoku programming-problems solved. The source-code is heavily commented, so hopefully it’ll do some good.

Here we go:

common.h, os.h (just common stuff)
Board.h, Board.cpp (The core stuff)
SudokuZen.cpp (Usage example)

A package that may compile: SudokuZen.zip
The picture was drawn by my brother, for a game we never released.