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!

Advent of Code: Day 2

2015-12-02

Source

Part 1: A gift requires enough wrapping paper to cover the surface plus an additional amount equal to the area smallest side. Calculate the total wrapping paper needed for a list of dimensions of the form 2x3x4.

Glorious Gification of HipChat Rooms

2015-12-02

To counter yesterday’s post on Iterating the GitHub API, how about something a little more lighthearted today: GIFs¹.

Advent of Code: Day 1

2015-12-01

Source

Part 1: Given a string of () characters controlling a simulated elevator, where ( means ‘go up’ and ) means ‘go down’, what floor do you end up on?

Advent of Code

2015-12-01

I’m always on the lookout for new sources of quick¹ coding puzzles. This holiday season, Advent of Code scratches precisely that itch.

Advent of Code is a series of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels. They are self-contained and are just as appropriate for an expert who wants to stay sharp as they are for a beginner who is just learning to code. Each puzzle calls upon different skills and has two parts that build on a theme. – About - Advent of Code

I’ve been working out each problem thus far in Python (my language of choice; along with Racket). I’m backfilling the first seven posts (along with this one), but I’ll try to do the rest daily.

Iterating the GitHub API (For users sans MFA)

2015-12-01

Today I found myself auditing an organization’s users to see which have multifactor authentication enabled¹. Since we have a not insignificant number of users, I wanted to write a quick script to automate it. Down the rabbit hole I go… and now I have a clean way of iterating across paginated GitHub API responses.

Finding EC2 instances by tag

2015-10-30

Another script similar to my previous post about Finding AWS IAM users by access key. This time, we want to do much the same thing for EC2 instances by tag.

Takuzu solver

2015-10-29

Based on a /r/dailyprogrammer puzzle: Takuzu solver.

Basically, Takuzu is a logic puzzle similar to Sudoku. You are given a grid partially filled with 0s and 1s. You have to fill in the rest of the grid according to three simple rules:

You cannot have more than three of the same number in a line
Each column must have an equal number of 0s and 1s¹
No two rows or no two columns can be identical

Thus, if you have a puzzle like this:

0.01.1
0....1
..00..
..00..
1....0
10.0.0

One valid solution (most puzzles should have only a single valid answer, but that doesn’t always seem to be the case):

Let’s do it!

Mandelbrot

2015-09-14

Perhaps the best known fractal of all: the Mandelbrot set.

Since I was already working on Python code that would render an image given a function (for a future post), I figured that I might as well render fractals with it.

Backing up GitHub repositories

2015-09-08

The newest chapter in my quest to collect entirely too much data / back up All The Things!: GitHub.

Basically, I want to back up all of my own personal GitHub repositories along with any from organizations that I am involved with. Strictly speaking, this is a little strange, since it’s unlikely that GitHub is going anywhere soon and, if it does, we are likely to have fair warning. But still, it’s nice to have a local copy just in case GitHub is down.

Adjacency Matrix Generator

2015-08-24

Been a while since I’ve actually tackled one of the Daily Programmer challenges, so let’s try one out. From a week and a half ago, we are challeneged to make an adjacency matrix generator, turning a graphical representation of a graph into an adjacency matrix.

Input:

a-----b
|\   / \
| \ /   \
|  /     e
| / \   /
|/   \ /
c-----d

Output: