Most conversions I've seen of NFA's to DFA's are ugly. THey involve cross multiplying the states so you get a huge state table for your DFA. I dont know why all the texts use this awful approach but I developed a much faster one when forced to do this conversion on a test. In the resultant DFA most of the nodes are never visited...the quickest way to find the DFA is to start with the NFA start point and only consider those nodes that it is possible to visit giving your rules.