Rob Farley

Rob Rob Farley has been consulting in IT since completing a Computer Science degree with first class honours in 1997. Before moving to Adelaide, he worked in consultancies in Melbourne and London. He runs the development department in one of Australia's leading IT firms, as well as doing database application consultancy and training. He heads up the Adelaide SQL Server User Group, and holds several Microsoft certifications.

Rob has been involved with Microsoft technologies for most of his career, but has also done significant work with Oracle and Unix systems. His preferred database is SQL Server and his preferred language is C#. Recently he has been involved with Microsoft Learning in the US, creating and reviewing new content for the next generation of Microsoft exams.

Over the years, Rob's clients have included BP Oil, OneLink Transit, Accenture, Avanade, Australian Electorial Commission, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, the Royal Borough of Kingston, Help The Aged, Unisys, Department of Treasury and Finance (Vic), National Mutual, the Bible Society and others.

Did you mean to come here? My blog is now at http://msmvps.com/blogs/robfarley



22 February 2006

Calendar cube thing

Roslyn and I were recently given a thing where you have cubes with numbers on to represent the date. The idea is that every day, you manually change the numbers displayed on the two 'dice', so that the number is between 01 and 31.

The geek in me glanced at the thing, and suddenly got curious about these two dice. If there's no geekness in you, then stop reading now, please. I just got curious about how the numbers were distributed between the two cubes. There were only two, which straight away told me that something clever must've been done.

A cube has six sides, and these were no different.

I could tell that clearly each cube needed the numbers 1 and 2, so that you can represent the 11th and the 22nd of any month.

As well as that, you need zero on both, because you can't have all of 1-9 on the 'other' cube.

So... we have 0,1,2 and three blanks on each cube. But we still have 3-9 to assign. That's seven numbers, in six spots. And here's the really nice bit, as to why that's okay...

Because you don't need both 6 AND 9, you just need one of them. :) Yeah, ok. I'm a big geek.