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… before taking a hard turn into the private sector to follow my PhD advisor.

Since then, I’ve worked in the computer security space at a couple of different companies. Some don’t exist any more, some you’ve probably heard of. I still program for fun too, and not just in security.

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

AoC 2022 Day 10: Interpretator

2022-12-10

Source: Cathode-Ray Tube

Part 1

Implement a simple virtual machine with two instructions: nop which does nothing for 1 cycles and addx $n which adds $n to the X register (initial value 1) in two cycles. Calculate the sum of cycle * X for the cycles 20, 60, 100, 140, 180, 220.

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AoC 2022 Day 9: Ropeinator

2022-12-09

Source: Rope Bridge

Part 1

Simulate two connected links such that whenever the first link (head) moves, the tail moves to follow according to the following rules:

  • If the tail is at the same location as head, don’t move
  • If the tail is adjacent to the head (orthogonal or diagonal), don’t move
  • If the tail is in the same row/column as the head, move one directly towards it orthogonally
  • If the tail is in neither the same row nor column, move one towards diagonally

Count how many unique spaces are visited by the tail of the link.

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AoC 2022 Day 5: Stackinator

2022-12-05

Source: Supply Stacks

Part 1

Given a list of stacks of syntax 1 and instructions in the form syntax 2, apply each instruction to pop qty items from the stack src and put them on dst one at a time.

Syntax 1: Stacks

    [D]    
[N] [C]    
[Z] [M] [P]
 1   2   3 

Syntax 2: Instructions

move 1 from 2 to 1
move 3 from 1 to 3
move 2 from 2 to 1
move 1 from 1 to 2

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