The earliest memory I have of ‘programming’ is in the early/mid 90s when my father brought home a computer from work. We could play games on it … so of course I took the spreadsheet program he used (LOTUS 123, did I date myself with that?) and tried to modify it to print out a helpful message for him. It … halfway worked? At least I could undo it so he could get back to work…

After that, I picked up programming for real in QBASIC (I still have a few of those programs lying around), got my own (junky) Linux desktop from my cousin, tried to learn VBasic (without a Windows machine), and eventually made it to high school… In college, I studied computer science and mathematics, mostly programming in Java/.NET, although with a bit of everything in the mix. A few of my oldest programming posts on this blog are from that time.

After that, on to grad school! Originally, I was going to study computational linguistics, but that fell through. Then programming languages (the school’s specialty). And finally I ended up studying censorship and computer security. That’s about where I am today!

But really, I still have a habit of doing a little bit of everything. Whatever seems interesting at the time!

Posts

Crosslinks by Title in Hugo

2021-07-15

Another quick Hugo post. One thing I miss about my previous blogging platform(s) was the ability to generate quick links between posts just by using the title of the post. So rather than this:

a cool post

This is [a cool post]({{< ref "2021-07-15-crosslinks-by-title-in-hugo" >}}), go read it.

You could do this:

This is {{< crosslink title="Crosslinks by Title in Hugo" text="a cool post" >}}.

Or shorter: {{< crosslink "Crosslinks by Title in Hugo" >}}.

And it should just work.

Ordering Board Game Geek GeekLists by Rank

2021-06-28

A quick script.

I play a lot of board games. With the whole COVID-19 mess, I’ve been playing a lot on Board Game Arena, which is a wonderful site. But one thing that’s a bit lacking is having ratings / metadata about games to great games I’ve just not heard about before. Where can you get lots of that data? Board Game Geek!

The problem though, is merging the two. So, how do we do it? Well, this time around, I’m going to start with this GeekList that someone else maintains of BGA games on BGG. Which has the games, but no ranks. And apparently there are no ways to rank those by BGG (for some reason). But that’s easy when you know a bit of scripting!

Generating a Book Bingo Chart in Hugo

2021-06-26

Another r/Fantasy 2021 Book Bingo post! How in the world am I generating this (updating) chart in Hugo?

2021 Book Bingo

SFF anthology or collection Attack on Titan, Vol. 1	Set in Asia (Hard: by an Asian author)	r/Fantasy A to Z Genre Guide (Hard: by a BIPOC author)	Found Family (Hard: featuring an LGBTQ+ character)	First person POV (Hard: Multiple)
r/Fantasy Book Club (Hard: with participation)	New to you author (Hard: haven’t heard much about)	Gothic Fantasy (Hard: not in the Book Riot article) Mexican Gothic (Hard Mode)	Backlist book (Hard: published before 2000)	Revenge-seeking character (Hard: revenge as the major book plot)
Mystery plot (Hard: not primary world urban fantasy) Six Wakes (Hard Mode)	Comfort read (Hard: that isn’t a reread) Wild Sign (Hard Mode)	Debut novel (Hard: published in 2021) Tales of Nezura: Book 1: The Zevolra (Hard Mode)	Cat squasher (500+ pages; Hard: 800+ pages)	SFF-related nonfiction (Hard: published in the last 5 years)
Latinx or Latin American author (Hard: with fewer than 1000 Goodreads ratings)	Self published (Hard: with fewer than 50 Goodreads ratings) Tales of Nezura: Book 1: The Zevolra (Hard Mode)	Forest setting (Hard: for the entire book) Annihilation (Hard Mode)	Genre mashup (Hard: of three or more genres) Gideon the Ninth (Hard Mode)	Has chapter titles of more than one word (Hard: for every chapter) The Midnight Library (Hard Mode)
___ of ___ (Hard: and ___)	First contact (Hard: that doesn’t lead to war) Project Hail Mary (Hard Mode)	Trans or Nonbinary (Hard: protagonist)	Debut author (Hard: with an AMA)	Witches (Hard: as the main protagonist) A Great and Terrible Beauty (Hard Mode)

A Generic Brute Force Backtracking Solver

2021-06-25

One of the projects I’ve had vaguely in the back of my head is a sort of generic puzzle solver. I really love puzzles, but of the pencil and paper and video game varieties. So I think it would be awesome to write out a definition of a puzzle (say how to play Sudoku), give it input, and have it give me an answer back.

Well, I finally got around to trying it!

Categorizing r/Fantasy Book Bingo Books

2021-06-24

I’ve been working through the r/Fantasy 2021 Book Bingo this year:

2021 Book Bingo

SFF anthology or collection Attack on Titan, Vol. 1	Set in Asia (Hard: by an Asian author)	r/Fantasy A to Z Genre Guide (Hard: by a BIPOC author)	Found Family (Hard: featuring an LGBTQ+ character)	First person POV (Hard: Multiple)
r/Fantasy Book Club (Hard: with participation)	New to you author (Hard: haven’t heard much about)	Gothic Fantasy (Hard: not in the Book Riot article) Mexican Gothic (Hard Mode)	Backlist book (Hard: published before 2000)	Revenge-seeking character (Hard: revenge as the major book plot)
Mystery plot (Hard: not primary world urban fantasy) Six Wakes (Hard Mode)	Comfort read (Hard: that isn’t a reread) Wild Sign (Hard Mode)	Debut novel (Hard: published in 2021) Tales of Nezura: Book 1: The Zevolra (Hard Mode)	Cat squasher (500+ pages; Hard: 800+ pages)	SFF-related nonfiction (Hard: published in the last 5 years)
Latinx or Latin American author (Hard: with fewer than 1000 Goodreads ratings)	Self published (Hard: with fewer than 50 Goodreads ratings) Tales of Nezura: Book 1: The Zevolra (Hard Mode)	Forest setting (Hard: for the entire book) Annihilation (Hard Mode)	Genre mashup (Hard: of three or more genres) Gideon the Ninth (Hard Mode)	Has chapter titles of more than one word (Hard: for every chapter) The Midnight Library (Hard Mode)
___ of ___ (Hard: and ___)	First contact (Hard: that doesn’t lead to war) Project Hail Mary (Hard Mode)	Trans or Nonbinary (Hard: protagonist)	Debut author (Hard: with an AMA)	Witches (Hard: as the main protagonist) A Great and Terrible Beauty (Hard Mode)

Partitioning a Linked List

2021-04-20

One more fairly standard tech interview problem (for better or for worse, you’re likely to see one of these if you go for a programming job):

Given a linked list and an element x. Partition the list so that all elements less than x are before elements greater than or equal to x, but do not otherwise change the order of the elements.

Dynamic Programming over a Matrix

2021-04-13

Another LeetCode problem. Given an MxN matrix of numbers, find the longest path of strictly increasing numbers. So for example in this matrix: 994 668 211 You can start with the 1 in the bottom center, go left to the two, then up to the 6, and 9. That’s the longest path, so return a 4. In this 3x3 case, it’s really easy to just brute force.

Phone Words--In English!

2021-04-09

Okay, let’s take this one step further. Rather than generating just phone words, let’s actually generate phone words. Someone has provided a list of words in English as a package, so we’ll add a filter to add that to our comprehension: from english_words import english_words_set def letterCombinations(self, digits: str) -> List[str]: if not digits: return [] letters = { '1': '', '2': 'abc', '3': 'def', '4': 'ghi', '5': 'jkl', '6': 'mno', '7': 'pqrs', '8': 'tuv', '9': 'wxyz', '0': ' ', } return [ word for product in itertools.

Phone Words

2021-04-06

Working through a few problems on LeetCode. I haven’t quite decided what I think of the site, but it’s a fun way to play with simple algorithms. Figured I might as well write up any I find interesting.

First interesting problem:

Given a standard lettered keypad, generate all words from a given phone number.

A quick ruby DSL for creating L-Systems

2021-03-24

L-Systems are pretty awesome. With only a bare few rules, you can turn something like this:

LSystem.new("Barnsley Fern") do
    start "+++X"

    rule "X", "F+[[X]-X]-F[-FX]+X" 
    rule "F", "FF"

    terminal "F" do forward end
    terminal "[" do push end
    terminal "]" do pop end
    terminal "-" do rotate -25 end
    terminal "+" do rotate +25 end
end

Into this: