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!

The 147 Puzzle

2013-02-06

Yesterday saw another puzzle from Programming Praxis, this one entitled The 147 Puzzle. The description is relatively straight forward. Find a set of k fractions each with numerator 1 such that the sum is equal to one.

For example, 1/5 + 1/5 + 1/5 + 1/5 + 1/5 = 1 is a trivial solution for k = 5. It turns out that there are 147 solutions when k = 5, thus the name of the puzzle.

#1GAM - ChessLike 1.0 - Did it!

2013-02-01

Well there you have it. Three days to a feature complete game.

I ended cutting one of the kinds of levels, but other than that I got everything that I wanted in the game. It’s got 10 different kinds of pieces, 8 different kinds of levels (most procedurally generated), and statistics galore. It actually turned out to be kind of fun, although it’s a bit slower than I’d like. Not much I can do about that though without implementing a mouse interface (which I’ll probably do some day).

#1GAM - ChessLike 0.2.0 - Dungeons!

2013-01-31

Here’s another day’s work on ChessLike. It’s actually a bit less full featured than yesterday, but I’ve made a lot of progress towards the dungeon framework that I’m going for.

#1GAM - ChessLike 0.1.5

2013-01-30

Back around the last Ludum Dare, I decided to try out One Game A Month. Basically, the goal is to write one complete game per month, every month in 2013. Of course I’m great at putting things off until the very last minute–I finally started yesterday. So it goes.

An optimal alphabetizing cipher

2013-01-25

Here is today’s /r/dailyprogramming challenge: Generate a simple substitution cipher such that the maximum number of words in a given dictionary of six letter words (there are 7,260 of them) are encoded as strings in alphabetical order.

Gregorian/Mayan conversion

2013-01-25

It may be 1 uinal, 15 kin too late for the new baktun, but I’ve got some neat code to convert back and forth between the Gregorian calendar and the Mayan calendar. It’s based on a challenge on a post on the /r/dailyprogrammer subreddit. As one might expect, the goal is to be able to take a year, month, and day in the Gregorian calendar and return the equivalent Mayan Long Count corresponding to that date. As a bonus (which of course I had to do 😄), do the opposite and do it without using built in date functions.

Splay heaps redux-imperative model

2013-01-24

I did say in yesterday’s comments that I would try re-implementing splay heaps using an imperative model with an array (Scheme’s vector) as the back end rather than a functional one with trees. Well, here is is.

Sorting via splay heap

2013-01-23

Yesterday’s post from Programming Praxis gives a new (or at least different) vantage point on one of the most common problems in Computer Science: sorting. Today, we’re going to implement a data structure known as a splay heap and use that to perform a heapsort.

Triangle Trilemma

2013-01-20

Four points, a square?) and comes originally from a Google Code Jam problem. The problem is stated simply enough

Accept three points as input, determine if they form a triangle, and, if they do, classify it at equilateral (all three sides the same), isoceles (two sides the same, the other different), or scalene (all three sides different), and also classify it as acute (all three angles less than 90 degrees), obtuse (one angle greater than 90 degrees) or right (one angle equal 90 degrees).

But once you start implementing it, that’s when things get more interesting. 😄

Decoding escaped Unicode strings

2013-01-17

In one of my current research projects involving large amounts of Twitter data from a variety of countries, I came across an interesting problem. The Twitter stream is encoded as a series of JSON objects–each of which has been written out using ASCII characters. But not all of the Tweets (or even a majority in this case) can be represented with only ASCII. So what happens?

Well, it turns out that they encode the data as JSON strings with Unicode escape characters. So if we had the Russian hashtag #победазанами (victory is ours), that would be encoded as such:

"#\u043f\u043e\u0431\u0435\u0434\u0430\u0437\u0430\u043d\u0430\u043c\u0438"