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!

Cracker Barrel Peg Game, Part 3

2014-07-10

If you were paying attention when I posted part 2 to GitHub (pegs.rkt), you might have noticed a function I hadn’t talked about: play

Cracker Barrel Peg Game, Part 2

2014-07-09

Hey, remember that post a few days ago about the Cracker Barrel peg game? Right at the end, I mentioned that there would be a part two, all about how to bend the puzzle at least a bit to your advantage. Basically, rather than finding the first solution to the peg game, we’re going to find all of them. From there, we can determine which moves are easier to win from, which are harder, and which are downright impossible. Let’s do it!

Cracker Barrel Peg Game

2014-07-05

Ever been to Cracker Barrel? Remember that peg game? It seems that rather a few people are interested in how to solve it: Google. Let’s do that.

Factor trees

2014-06-17

Another five minute challenge¹, this time from /r/dailyprogrammer: given any positive integer, create and render a factor tree.

Call stack bracket matcher

2014-06-11

Five minute post from Programming Praxis:

Write a function to return true/false after looking at a string. Examples of strings that pass:

{}, [], (), a(b)c, abc[d], a(b)c{d[e]}

Examples of strings that don’t pass:

{], (], a(b]c, abc[d}, a(b)c{d[e}]

What the (be)funge‽

2014-06-10

Here’s a fun little bit of code for you:

55*4*v    _   v
v   <>:1-:^
    |:<$      <    ,*48 <
    @>0"zzif">:#,_$      v
>:3%!|    >0"zzub">:#,_$^
     >:5%!|
v "buzz"0<>:.           ^
         |!%5:           <
>:#,_   $>              ^

Gibberish you say? No! Befuge!

Braille unicode pixelation

2014-05-30

What would you do if you were on a machine that had no higher level graphics, but you still wanted to display images?

Quadtree image compression

2014-05-28

About two weeks ago, I came across a post via /r/programming: Quadtree Art^(src). In a sentence, the goal is to recursively divide an image into a quadtree, at each step expanding the current node with the largest internal variance.

Amicable chains

2014-05-23

Mathematicians are an odd bunch. Names for just about everyhing. There are amicable numbers and perfect number, sociable number and betrothed numbers. There are sublime number, frugal number, and quasiperfect number. Heck, there are powerful number, smooth number, and even sphenic numbers. Rather a lot to deal with all told… So let’s just focus on two of them: perfect numbers and amicable numbers.

Phone networks

2014-05-21

Another day, another challenge from /r/dailyprogrammer. It’s almost two weeks old now, but I’ve just now had a chance to get around it.

Your company has built its own telephone network. This allows all your remote locations to talk to each other. It is your job to implement the program to establish calls between locations.