Programming

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 10

2015-12-10 in Programming

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

Advent of Code: Day 9

2015-12-09 in Programming

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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 in Programming

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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 in Programming

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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.

Advent of Code: Day 6

2015-12-06 in Programming

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Part 1: Given a 1000 by 1000 grid of lights and a list of instructions of the form (turn on|turn off|toggle) 5,10 through 15,20, determine how many lights are on.

Advent of Code: Day 5

2015-12-05 in Programming

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Part 1: A ’nice’ string contains at least three vowels, one double letter (such as xx), and none of the strings ab, cd, pq, or xy. Count nice strings.

Advent of Code: Day 4

2015-12-04 in Programming

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Part 1: Mine Adventcoins. Basically, find the lowest integer such that the string {prefix}{integer} has an md5 hash with at least 5 leading zeros. ¹²³

Advent of Code: Day 3

2015-12-03 in Programming

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Part 1: Given a string of <>^v characters which mean move west, east, north, or south respectively and starting at the origin, how many unique positions do you pass through?

Advent of Code: Day 2

2015-12-02 in Programming

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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.