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!

Solving Loop Puzzles

2016-07-14

A quick puzzle from Daily Programmer:

∞ Loop is a mobile game that consists of nm tiles, placed in a nm grid. There are 16 different tiles:

┃, ━, ┏, ┓, ┛, ┗, ┣, ┳, ┫, ┻, ╋, ╹, ╺, ╻, ╸, ' '.

The objective is to create a closed loop: every pipe must have another tile facing it in the adjacent tile — for example if some tile has a pipe going right, its adjacent tile to the right must have a pipe going left.

The most straightforward solution is a hybrid combination of constraints and backtracking, similar to what I did when solving Takuzu and tile puzzles.

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Mirror iTunes playlists to Spotify

2016-06-22

At the moment, I have an Apple Music subscription. It’s great to be able to listen to more or less whatever music I want to. I switched from Spotify because they were missing a few artists that I actually did want to listen to. Unfortunately, there are a few things that Apple Music doesn’t do that I would like to have–chief among them the ability to play on a Roku.

One nice thing that Spotify does have though is a fairly powerful API: Spotify Web API. Inspired by a post on Spotify and billboard.py which automatically creates Spotify playlists from the Billboard music ranking charts, I decided to write up a script that can sync my playlists from iTunes to Spotify.

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Parsing Motorola Surfboard stats

2016-06-04

A few weeks ago, I was having some pretty bad problems with my internet randomly hanging. Given that I’m now working from home, that wasn’t exactly the most optimal of situations to find myself in, so I decided to dig a bit deeper. After a bit of looking, I found myself at my cable modem’s built in web page:

(This is after I fixed my problem. The values aren’t perfect but they’re much better.)

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Automatically uploading files

2016-06-03

Quick post today. I was working on a website where I have a live server running the code on another machine. I wanted to write a quick script that would copy any files I changed to the remote machine. This is something you can do automatically in most IDEs, but I wanted something both a bit lighter weight and to have the excuse to write something myself.

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