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!

Translate CSV to HTML

2013-01-16

Yesterday’s post from Programming Praxis asks us to write a function that will read content formatted as comma-separated values and output the result as an HTML table. Their solution uses the text file database library that they posted about (which is a neat concept, you should check it out), but I think I’m going to work out the solution more directly.

Wombat IDE - It's Alive! (bug fixes)

2013-01-06

It’s alive!

I haven’t worked on Wombat in a while, but with the new semester quickly approaching, I figured that it would be a good time to take out a few of the outstanding bugs on the issue tracker. Granted, there’s still a fair few, but it’s a start.

Four points, a square?

2013-01-03

Another post from Programming Praxis. This one was originally intended for Friday but they posted it early, so I figured I would go ahead and do the same. The problem is actually deceptively straight forward:

Given four points, do they form a square?

Happy New Year

2013-01-02

Yesterday’s post from Programming Praxis asks us to build a very special sort of expression. Using the numbers 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 in that order along with the operators of multiplication, division, addition, subtraction, and concatenation, find all of the ways that we can write an expression totaling 2013. Here’s one valid solution:

109 - 8 * 7 + 654 * 3 - 2 / 1 = 2013

Parallel BF

2012-12-31

Getting a bit close to the deadline, but I think I have something that’s pretty interesting. Basically, it’s the same BF interpreter that I wrote about yesterday with four additional commands:

&	Spawn a new thread; set the current cell to 0 in the parent and 1 in the child
~	Kill the current thread
!	Send a ping on the channel specified by the current cell
?	Wait for a ping on the channel specified by the current cell

A Brainf**k Interpreter

2012-12-30

The PLT Games website has a competition going where each month there will be some sort of theme for a completely new program. The first theme is a Turing Tarpit–a language that is technically Turing complete and thus can do anything any other Turing complete language can, but is so minimal as to make doing anything worthwhile overly difficult.

Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy. – Alan Perlis, Epigrams on Programming

To that end, I’ve been working on a little something special which I may or may not finish by the end of the month (yes, I know that’s tomorrow). But while I was working on it, I put together a Brainf**k (BF) interpreter which I found pretty interesting to play with.

Nested Primes

2012-12-22

Yesterday’s post from Programming Praxis poses an interesting problem: find the largest prime n such that the result of repeatedly removing each digit of n from left to right is also always prime.

For example, 6317 would be such a number, as not only is it prime, but so are 317, 17, and 7.

Ludum Dare 25 - First favorites

2012-12-18

This past weekend was Ludum Dare 25, the newest in a competition that has been running for more than 10 years where the entire goal is to go from nothing to a complete video game in 48 hours or less. I didn’t manage to participate this time around, but I’m looking forward to trying it out next April (they run every four months in April, August, and December).

Narcissistic Numbers

2012-12-14

Today’s post from Programming Praxis posits an interesting problem: how can we (efficiently) find all of the narcissistic numbers (in base 10)?

Generating non-repeating strings

2012-12-12

Based on this post from Programming Praxis, today’s goal is to write an algorithm that, given a number N and an alphabet A, will generate all strings of length N made of letters from A with no adjacent substrings that repeat.

So for example, given N = 5 and A = {a, b, c} the string abcba will be allowed, but none of abcbc, ababc, nor even aabcb will be allowed (the bc, ab, and a repeat).

It’s a little more general even than the version Programming Praxis specifies (they limit the alphabet to exactly *A = {1, 2, 3} *and more more general still than their original source which requires only one possible string, but I think it’s worth the extra complications.