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!

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Recent posts

Combining sort and uniq

2014-02-07

A fairly common set of command line tools (at least for me) is to combine sort and uniq to get a count of unique items in a list of unsorted data. Something like this:

$ find . -type 'f' | rev | cut -d "." -f "1" | rev | sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head

2649 htm
1458 png
 993 cache
 612 jpg
 135 css
 102 zip
  99 svg
  60 gif
  45 js
  27 pdf

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Factoring factorials

2014-01-27

There was a new post on Programming Praxis a few days ago that seemed pretty neat:

Given a positive integer n, compute the prime factorization, including multiplicities, of n! = 1 · 2 · … · n. You should be able to handle very large n, which means that you should not compute the factorial before computing the factors, as the intermediate result will be extremely large.

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Graph coloring

2014-01-15

Here’s another one from /r/dailyprogrammer:

… Your goal is to color a map of these regions with two requirements: 1) make sure that each adjacent department do not share a color, so you can clearly distinguish each department, and 2) minimize these numbers of colors.

Essentially, graph coloring.

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Graph radius

2014-01-14

Here’s a quick problem from the DailyProgrammer subreddit. Basically, we want to calculate the radius of a graph:

radius(g) = \min\limits_{n_0 \in g} \max\limits_{n_1 \in g} d_g(n_0, n_1)

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Overlapping circles

2014-01-03

Here’s a quick little programming task that I came to via a post on L2Program (who in turn seems to have found it on Reddit). The basic idea is to take a given list of circles and to determine the area enclosed (while correctly accounting for overlap).

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Edges to adjacency

2013-12-23

Another quick one, this time from /r/dailyprogrammer:

Your goal is to write a program that takes in a list of edge-node relationships, and print a directed adjacency matrix for it. Our convention will follow that rows point to columns. Follow the examples for clarification of this convention.

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Twitter puddle

2013-11-30

This one has been sitting in my backlog for a while and its been a while since I’ve gotten to write a programming post1, but now seems as good time as ever: Twitter puzzle

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Making music, part 3: Making noise

2013-11-12

Last week we parsed some music. That post was in a bit of a hurry, so we had to leave off a fair few important pieces (like ties and slurs for one; chords for a rather bigger one). We’ll get to them soon, but for now we want to actually get something playing back.

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