private static void Sort(List<int> integers)
        {
            foreach (int i in integers)
            {
                Thread t = new Thread(new ParameterizedThreadStart(display));
                t.Start(i);
            }
        }

        private static void display(object x)
        {
            int i = (int)x;
            Thread.Sleep(i * 100);
            Console.WriteLine(i);
        }

If all the stars align and your list is short enough this will sort properly!

*SHEERS*

As you probably saw either on Google, my site or any of the thousands of sites that reported it. In order to celebrate Pacmas 30th anniversary the folks at our favorite company Google, made their first ever animated doodle which let you play Pacman with its original sounds and levels. The blog at rescuetime.com has speculated that this awesome little stunt may have cost us $298,803,988.

If we take Wolfram Alpha at its word, Google had about 504,703,000 unique visitors on May 23. If we assume that our userbase is representative, that means:

• Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day)
• $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr (note that cost is 1.3 – 2.0 X pay rate).
• For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time. Imagine what you could build with that army of man power.
• $298,803,988 is the dollar tally if all of the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee.

I don’t believe this numbers to be anywhere near accurate and I still appreciate and enjoyed thoroughly what Google did. I wonder if anyone ever calculated how much money we loose on Facebook every day?

As usual Google has chosen to use, it’s logo to honor what could be considered one of the biggest games of all times. However, this time there is a twist. If you stay in the page long enough and click around. The doodle comes alive allowing you to control the pacman and play the game with the original sounds and all.

The interactive doodle — a first for Google — is the brainchild of senior user experience designer Marcin Wichary, whose earliest exposure to Pac-Man came at age five while traveling across his native Poland with his father, a game technician, to repair arcade machines. Wichary worked with Google doodler (yes, it’s a real job) Ryan Germick to create the finished design. more…

This right here, is why I love Google!

Update: Google has just posted an entry on their blog about the pacman game and its significance.

When I was growing up, my dad had the best job I could possibly imagine: he was an arcade game and pinball technician. For me, that meant summer trips through Poland’s coastal cities with their seasonal arcade parlors; peeking inside cabinets to learn programming and engineering secrets; and—of course—free games!

One of my favorites was PAC-MAN, whose popularity transcended the geopolitical barriers of that time. During the heyday of space shooters, Tōru Iwatani’s creation stood out as one of the first video games aimed at a broader audience, with a cute story of pizza-shaped character gobbling dots in a maze, colorful (literally!) characters, friendly design, very little violence and everlasting fun.

Today, on PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday, you can rediscover some of your 8-bit memories—or meet PAC-MAN for the first time—through our first-ever playable Google doodle. To play the game, go to google.com during the next 48 hours (because it’s too cool to keep for just one day) and either press the “Insert Coin” button or just wait for a few seconds.

Google doodler Ryan Germick and I made sure to include PAC-MAN’s original game logic, graphics and sounds, bring back ghosts’ individual personalities, and even recreate original bugs from this 1980’s masterpiece. We also added a little easter egg: if you throw in another coin, Ms. PAC-MAN joins the party and you can play together with someone else (PAC-MAN is controlled with arrow keys or by clicking on the maze, Ms. PAC-MAN using the WASD keys).

It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

more…

It seems that the endless rumors about Google making an Operating System were not unfounded after all. After this announcement I went through the list of Google products, and I have found that basically Google’s model is simple. They take an existing product or function and create an improved version of it, in accordance with the company’s view. By making such a product the force the hand of the previous competitors, thus accelerating the evolution of said product and benefiting everyone.

Take Gmail for example, before Gmail came around all web based free email platforms had ridiculous restrictions 2-10 mb per account, no large attachments, poor POP and IMAP support etc… Then along comes Gmail and it blows all the caps and restrictions providing free unlimited space with POP and IMAP support excellent search and a snazzy interface. Immediately the competition reacts and now most of the web based email platforms support a wide range of features and unlimited space.

Google has done this with many of their products , Google Earth, Google News, Google Voice, the threat to buy the 700 mghz spectrum and many more. Google is playing a game and the thing is, that they are good at it. With this announcement about an OS they just threw the ball in Microsoft’s court. I guarantee you that the next version of “Windows” will take a lot from this.

This version features a cool new button on the tool bar,   by pressing it the whole screen became viewable in 3D by using stereoscopic glasses.

This in itself although a novelty doesn’t represent much. But looking at the way the layout changes and the way the button behaves, one could conclude infer that this was made utilizing what would be the plug in functionality of Chrome. So maybe in the very near future Google will reveal the next version/phase of its awesome browser.

Take it as you wish!

One of the things I have always done is provide extensive config files in XML format in order to alleviate having to modify the code when simple things change such as passwords, database names, host addresses etc. This has in my opinion always been a great venue to ensure maintainability and stability. But the big issue always was XML..

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a general-purpose specification for creating custom markup languages.[1] It is classified as an extensible language, because it allows the user to define the mark-up elements. XML’s purpose is to aid information systems in sharing structured data, especially via the Internet, [2] to encode documents, and to serialize data; in the last context, it compares with text-based serialization languages such as JSON, YAML and S-Expressions. [3]
more…

The problem I’ve always had with XML is parsing the file; although the support for it and the built in tools have improved greatly over the past few years it still requires considerable amount of code in order to gather the data in some languages (C#), and another considerable amount of code in order to update or change the data in the file. When I was learning Object Oriented programming a while back we were introduced to the concept of Serialization

In computer science, in the context of data storage and transmission, serialization is the process of converting an object into a sequence of bits so that it can be stored on a storage medium (such as a file, or a memory buffer) or transmitted across a network connection link. When the resulting series of bits is reread according to the serialization format, it can be used to create a semantically identical clone of the original object. For many complex objects, such as those that make extensive use of references, this process is not straightforward.
more…

But like the Wikipedia definition above says “this process is not straightforward”, you used to have to define Interfaces and formats and if your object had any kind of list or array in it, you couldn’t use it unless you wanted to spend a considerable amount of time making it work.

While I was working on the practice projects I grew to hate Serialization and had not used it since. Yesterday in a fit of rage, because my XML config file was being stubborn I stumbled across an implementation that used a Serialized object for storing configuration. I was baffled by the ease in which this was accomplished and I immediately implemented it. Now it its extremely easy to add and remove config parameters from my program and at the same time I don’t have to worry about someone deleting or changing the config file since it is stored in binary and gets re-created if deleted.

In order to serialize an object your class must be declared as [Serializable] . After you have done this, the below example will take care of the serialization for you.

//Serialize an Object
FileStreamfs = new FileStream(@”prog.conf”, FileMode.Create); //Create new File where the object will live
BinaryFormatter bf = new BinaryFormatter(); //Create new BinaryFormatter to Serilize Object
bf.Serialize(fs, YOUROBJECT); //Serialize Object
fs.Close(); //Close File

//Deserialize
FileStreamfs = newFileStream(@”prog.conf”,FileMode.Open);  //Open File Containing Serialized Object
YOUROBJECT obj = (YOUROBJECT) (new BinaryFormatter().Deserialize(fs));
fs.Close(); //Close File

Remember to include the System.IO and System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Binary libraries.

You’re looking at the real-time stream of posts from your friends and connections. Control the stream using the filters on the left. To hide posts from friends in this stream, click the “x” in the upper-right corner of a post. Learn more.

My fiance was one of the lucky first to be changed over and I am using her account to write this, it seems to me that either they haven’t turned the service fully on or they are missing the boat completely. I used my personal account to make an updated and I expected it to show automatically on her home page since its supposed to be a live stream. I waited several minutes and saw no change, I had to refresh the page for it to pull up the new status changes and updates. So far I am not very impressed although I must say that the change is small enough to get by without much trouble unlike the beacon feauture and the terms of service.

Here is a screens-shot of her profile after the change.

How do you like the new change? Did it work as advertised?

HAVANA (Reuters) – Cuba launched its own variant of the Linux computer operating system this week in the latest front of the communist island’s battle against what it views as U.S. hegemony. The Cuban variant, called Nova, was introduced at a Havana computer conference on “technological sovereignty” and is central to the Cuban government’s desire to replace the Microsoft software running most of the island’s more…

Cuba has always had a reputation for not allowing freedom of information and such, but with the launch of their new Linux Distro and now allowing regular citizens to obtain PCs, they are getting a lot closer to what would be considered freedom of information.

According to Hector Rodriguez, dean of the School of Free Software at Cuba’s University of Information Sciences, about 20 percent of computers in Cuba, where computer sales to the public began only last year, are currently using Linux

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTXIzaxfox4

Being born and raised in Cuba i find it exciting that my country is finally moving up in the technology world, I love the initiative they have taken and I have faith that they will reach the goal of having Linux on the majority of the PCs they run.

Hector Rodriguez Dean of the School of Free Software and the University of Information Sciences is my cousin, I talk to him on a regular basis and I have just contacted him to get me more information about what the distro is based on and see if I can get my hands on a copy. I’ll post more updates as the become available to me.

But on a personal note and in contrast with the philosophy we have in this country I find it absurd and ridiculous that all our government and educational institutions have been standardized on Windows to the point that there are people out there that have no idea there are other operating systems available.

Can you imagine the amount of money that Schools and Universities would save if they are made the push to go open source. I am not saying get rid of windows but at least go open source with some of the apps used, replace MS Offie with Open Office and Photo-shop with Gimp these two replacements alone would account of millions of dollars in savings a year. We complain about the budget deficit but refuse to do simple things to help out.

This may be weird or odd but I think we should follow in Cuba’s foot steps when it comes to this.

Personally I am sick of all this companies patenting all this technology and making it difficult for the industry to advance. If this patent encompass all I assume it does then creating a multi touch platform for any mobile device will be almost impossible, why can’t everyone share Linus Torvalds prospective? Haven’t we learned enough about the nature of this business to understand that you get more out of things when you make them available to everyone?

Just last month Suze Orman the world renown financial expert launched a new book for 2009 strategies in economics, she put the book up on her website and gave it away for free. She has now sold more copies than she would have had she not done this. The same thing is happening with Monthy Phyton, they just opened a youtube channel giving away the best of their shows and clips, all of the sudden their DVD sales have sky rocketed an amazing 2300%. (Yes that’s not a typo)

Come on Apple! Learn to share