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!

Advent of Code: Day 15

2015-12-15

Source

Part 1: Input is a list of ingredients of the form:

Frosting: capacity 4, durability -2, flavor 0, texture 0, calories 5
Candy: capacity 0, durability 5, flavor -1, texture 0, calories 8

A recipe score is a product of the positive quantity scores (ignoring calories), where each quantity score is the product of the quantity and that product for each product.

For example, 4 Frosting and 2 Candy above, would have a score of of -2 * 4 + 5 * 2 = 2 for durability and 0 * 4 + -1 * 2 = -2 (and thus ignored as we only accept positive scores) for a total thus far of 2.

Advent of Code: Day 14

2015-12-14

Source

Part 1: Given a list of running patterns of the form Comet can fly 14 km/s for 10 seconds, but then must rest for 127 seconds., determine who will be in the lead after 2503 seconds.

Advent of Code: Day 13

2015-12-13

Source

Part 1: Given a list of seating preferences of the form Alice would gain 54 happiness units by sitting next to Bob. find the seating arrangement which maximizes total happiness.

Advent of Code: Day 12

2015-12-12

Source

Part 1: Sum all integer values in a JSON object.

CSV to JSON

2015-12-11

Today at work, I had to process a bunch of CSV data. Realizing that I don’t have any particularly nice tools to work with streaming CSV data (although I did write about querying CSV files with SQL), I decided to write one:

$ cat users.csv

"user_id","name","email","password"
"1","Luke Skywalker","[email protected]","$2b$12$XQ1zDvl5PLS6g.K64H27xewPQMnkELa3LvzFSyay8p9kz0XXHVOFq"
"2","Han Solo","[email protected]","$2b$12$eKJGP.tt9u77PeXgMMFmlOyFWSuRZBUZLvmzuLlrum3vWPoRYgr92"

$ cat users.csv | csv2json | jq '.'

{
  "password": "$2b$12$XQ1zDvl5PLS6g.K64H27xewPQMnkELa3LvzFSyay8p9kz0XXHVOFq",
  "name": "Luke Skywalker",
  "user_id": "1",
  "email": "[email protected]"
}
{
  "password": "$2b$12$eKJGP.tt9u77PeXgMMFmlOyFWSuRZBUZLvmzuLlrum3vWPoRYgr92",
  "name": "Han Solo",
  "user_id": "2",
  "email": "[email protected]"
}

Advent of Code: Day 11

2015-12-11

Source

Part 1: Find the next string in Lexicographical_order that matches these rules:

Must contain three neighboring, ascending letters (ghi)
Must not contain any of the letters i, o, or l
Must contain two distinct pairs of letters

Advent of Code: Day 10

2015-12-10

Source

Part 1: Repeat a Look-and-say sequence 40 times. Return the length.

Advent of Code: Day 9

2015-12-09

Source

Part 1: Given a list of distances between cities of the form London to Dublin = 464, calculate the shortest route that visits each city exactly once.

Advent of Code: Day 8

2015-12-08

Source

Part 1: Given an escaped string of the form "\xa8br\x8bjr\"", convert it to the escaped form: br js. Calculate the total difference of lengths between the former (16) and the latter (5).

Advent of Code: Day 7

2015-12-07

Source

Part 1: Given a list of definitions of the form 123 -> x, NOT e -> f, and x AND y -> z, with possible operations NOT, AND, OR, LSHIFT, and RSHIFT, find the value of a. Assume all values are 16-bit integers.