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!

Chess Puzzles 1: Get moving!

2014-08-21

Here’s something I haven’t done much¹: chess puzzles! I’m still not sure entirely what I think about the game in general. There is certainly quite a lot of strategy, which I like, but to really get good at chess, there’s also some amount of memorizing openings and closings. That’s something I’m a little less thrilled with.

Still, it’s the perfect sort of came to work out programming exercises with. It’s a game of perfect information, so you don’t have to deal with what a player knows and doesn’t. The pieces have well defined, regular moves² There’s a fairly intense branching factor, but not insurmountable–Deep Blue (chess computer) proved that.

Anyways, enough chatter. Let’s play some chess!

Minimal palindromic base

2014-08-13

What’s this? Two posts in one day? Well, writing a static blog generator can do that. 😄

Another easily phrased challenge:

We have a simple little problem today: Given an integer n > 2, find the minimum b > 1 for which n base b is a palindrome.

– Minimal Palindromic Base via Programming Praxis

Number words

2014-08-13

Today’s five minute post brought to you via Programming Praxis / Career Cup:

Given a positive integer, return all the ways that the integer can be represented by letters using the mapping 1 -> A, 2 -> B, …, 26 -> Z. For instance, the number 1234 can be represented by the words ABCD, AWD and LCD.

Onwards and upwards

2014-08-08

Huh. Things suddenly look a bit different around here, don’t they?

Long story short, I finally finished a project that I’ve been working on off and on for the better part of two years: converting my blog to a static website.

Langton's ant

2014-08-07

Here’s another post from /r/DailyProgrammer: Advanced Langton’s Ant. I’m a bit behind the times (see tomorrow’s post), but it’s still an interesting enough exercise, so let’s go for it!

Updating dotfiles

2014-08-04

After all of these updates to my dotfiles, I finally want something that I can use to keep them up to date. For that, let’s write a quick script that can do just that.

slowcat

2014-08-01

Sometimes cat just prints too quickly.

Regex search and replace

2014-07-31

Another random task that I find myself doing distressingly often: performing a regular expression search and replace recursively across a bunch of files. You can do this relatively directly with tools like sed, but I can never quite remember the particularly flavor of regular expression syntax sed uses.

Git aliases: undo, ud, and wipe

2014-07-28

A few new git aliases:

git undo - Undo the most recent commit, unstaging all new files
git up - Update remote branches and submodules, delete merged branches
git wipe - Remove all current changes, saving as a seperate branch

Parsing human readable times

2014-07-22

So what day was 9 days ago again?

$ when 9 days ago

2014-07-13