My Alt Codes Were Changed

Do a lot of mathematical calculations on your code affect performance?

The question is very vague -- it does not specify the kind of application we are talking about. However, I can give you an example to help you.Once upon a time, Noble Paul and I were asked to help optimize a back-end process which needed to find, for each city X, the N closest cities in the same country having >1 hotels, given (city name, country, latitude, longitude, number of hotels) data. The original code worked fine for small number of cities (about 80K, mostly in US) but now, the data had expanded to cover all countries and many millions of cities. The original code used the Haversine formula implemented in SQL (on MySQL) to create the data. This code appeared to be hung but actually it would finish in a couple of days if we let it run completely :)We ditched mysql and in a few hours, wrote the logic in Java, reading and processing records in memory, using threads to parallelize data for each country and reduced the run time to approximately 4 hours. Although, 4 hours would have been fine for a back-end process run once in a couple of days, we tried to find the bottleneck out of personal curosity. Our program was CPU bound. My first suspicion was that we were creating too many objects (hundreds of millions) which was slowing down everything. I optimized that to about 1/20th but the runtime hardly differed by a few seconds (thats when I realized that object creation in Java is insanely fast).Then Noble suggested that maybe the Haversine distance calculation is the culprit. I was skeptical but just for testing, we replaced the haversine formula with euclidean distance and the runtime reduced to 17 minutes! Now, obviously, we couldn't use euclidean distances but that gave us an idea. We changed to using euclidean distance formula to find the 15N nearest cities and then used Haversine formula to narrow down the nearest N cities. The final runtime was approx 25 minutes. That was a good day :)

The page numbers are all wrong in the index of my word document. How do I fix this?

A Word index is the calculated result of an INDEX field code, so the quick answer is to rebuild the index by being within it and pressing F9.Of course it isn’t always that simple…A bit of background first: When the INDEX field code is updated, Word accumulates the page number information for each of the “mark index” XE field codes found within the document, ignoring duplicates (i.e. >1 of the same XE found on a page), and then sorts and formats the result according to the switches used for the INDEX. You can see the INDEX and hidden-text XE field codes by pressing Alt-F9 to toggle between displaying field codes and their results.Since the resulting index is static, any changes to pagination that may affect the location of an XE field code will not be reflected until the index is rebuilt.This is similar to the TOC field codes (table of contents, figures or authorities), and why it is important to always recalculate both types after all pagination has been completed. If you don’t rebuild these elements, the page numbers may be incorrect.For the TOC, you can choose the option to just update the page numbers (useful if you have made formatting changes in the ToC), but the INDEX will be fully rebuilt during a field code recalculation. The INDEX field code has a number of switches to manage various options. Some are options found in the Index dialog, but other switches have no UI equivalent and will need to be added manually when Alt-F9 is toggled. Refer to this Microsoft support page for a description of switches for managing non-UI features — such as how to display page ranges (i.e. \g " to " will display a range of pages as Dental coverage, 16 to 19 instead of the default en-dash Dental coverage, 16–19).Note: If Alt-F9 does not show your index as { INDEX }, then it has either been created manually, or the field code was changed to its results by pressing Shift-Ctrl-F9. If the latter was the case, delete the index and use References > Insert Index to recreate one.

Moving abroad, would you change your last name if it was difficult to pronounce and write?

My sister had the same problem in the US: her last name was “Mărginean”. Even changing ă into a did little to help; she gets her name spelled every which way.I’d say it depends a lot on where you move. Here in Sweden, most people would probably cope with Hämäläinen fine; I myself don’t see it as a great challenge. I know your ä is different from the Swedish ä, but that adjustment is about as easy for me to make as it is for you to factor out.If you move to a country where the letter ä doesn’t exist in the official language(s), or a country where anything that’s not local presents an insurmountable pronunciation problem (like France, the UK or the US) then you’re probably better off legally changing your last name.Just bite the bullet; you’re not the first, and you won’t be the last. You have a beautiful name — are you really from Tavastia (Häme)? — but look at it as the opportunity that few people have; you can finally, legally choose the name Arnold Ibrahimovic-Einstein.

How do you type Roman numerals on a keyboard?

Uri Granta and Paul Oniisan are correct in the options they gave. If you would like to insert the Unicode Roman Numeral characters in Windows/Office documents using Alt codes, see ALT Codes for Roman Numerals.A couple of examples:ALT+8546 would give you ⅢALT+8551 would give you Ⅷ