Sudoku Solver

This afternoon I wrote a sudoku solver in Prolog. I haven't written a Prolog programme since I was at university nearly ten years ago, so it's a bit of a brute force attack really. I tested it on small grids to start with and it worked ok, but on a full sudoku so far it's taken three hundred and ninety-eight minutes and hasn't returned a result. I'll leave it going overnight, but if it hasn't worked it out by morning I'm giving up. Since I have no desire to learn how to code in Prolog properly. I could probably write something in Java to solve it in a few seconds. (That is, the solving would take a few seconds, not the writing.)

I'm Engaged

I got engaged a week ago yesterday. I haven't blogged about it until now because I wanted to tell people personally first. But it's official - I'm engaged to Naomi and will be marrying her here in Calgary next July. Hooray!

SUSE's KHelpCenter

I just accidentally hit F1 while in konqueror, and instead of the ugly help centre I usually see when I do that, I saw this. At first I thought SUSE had replaced the help centre with their own manuals, but then I realised they'd just changed the style of KDE's help pages. It's amazing how much different a bit of styling can make. It makes the help centre look a lot more friendly and helpful, and I might actually use it in future. Which is silly I know, because it still has the same content! I guess I subconsciously think 'these must be professionally written, useful help files. I will do well here', because it looks good, whereas before I was thinking 'these help files are geeky files. I'm not reading these. I'm going to Azerbaizhan'.

Shocking

My Wacom tablet has always been a little unstable on my computer. If I unplug it and replug it in I have to restart X. Sometimes I knock the cable and it makes linux think it was unplugged, and I have to restart X. And now, since coming to Canada, sometimes I get a little too much static on me and it zaps the tablet, and I have to restart X.

But I've found a way to avoid restarting X. At last! I knew it should be possible, because it said it was in the linuxwacom documentation, but I've never been able to before. And just now when my tablet got zapped again I tried to recompile the evdev module, but found that in SUSE it's not compiled as a module, so I can't. And then I saw that in SUSE they already, apparently, have the modifications compiled in anyway. Strange that my tablet doesn't reconnect then. So I unplugged it, removed the wacom module from memory and replugged it in. Still no joy. So I switched to a VT and then back to X and look - my cursor is moving again!

Now all I need to do is see if it's possible to write a script which will do all that automatically. Except I'd rather it re-enabled the pointer in X without switching to a VT first.