2013

• jQuery holdEvent

  The making of this plugin was completely a random act of hand-itchiness. A friend of mine (@cornguo) published a fun app online. There is a name for this kind of app, but I can’t recall at the moment. It typically displays some buttons (usually in a grid), and clicking them causes some sound to be played. The interesting part in cornguo’s app is that there’s a text-input field where the name of the buttons can be typed-in for replaying.

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• Quick Hack: Terminal Appearing from Right

  It is useful to have the terminal around whenever I code. However, while real screen estate is finite, having a terminal further limiting the amount of information that can be displayed at the same time. The problem with the terminal is that I don’t really need it all the time, so I usually find it buried under a group of windows.

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• Revisiting Fizz Buzz in PHP

  Back then when I was attending a job interview, I was asked to write a Fizz Buzz program to prove that my coding ability. There was only a pen and a piece of paper, so basically means there’s no way I can refer to the documentation for the API syntax. Fortunately I somehow managed to remember and not screw up.

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• Update in tools

  It is very much expected that there will be endless stream of new (and often times better) tools introduced to solve the same set of problems. While I am slowly resuming my programming work, and in the process of reviving my very much dead postgrad project, I found some alternative to the tools I had used in the past. I suppose I shall just jot them down here so that there’s a reference for later use.

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• Database transactions involving prepared statements

  I was thinking whether it is possible to avoid exposing PDO and PDOStatement objects to the users of my database library (mainly just me). While I was working on my project I sort of notice that there is a almost fixed pattern whenever I work with the database. With this in mind, I added in some new functions to the library, and decided to make a quick release for this.

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• Evaluating logical statements

  Often times one would have to write code to evaluate logical statements. For example, given statement p and q, what is p implies q? As there’s no operator for implication in PHP, one would have to rewrite the statement that consists only in NOT (!), AND (&&) and OR (||) operators. When there are a huge load of these statements, code can be difficult to read.

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• Evil evil update

  This update took me quite a bit more time than I initially expected. Anyway, I have done some refactoring work to the original code, and thought it would be nice to document the changes. Overall, most of the changes involved the refactoring of function names. I am not sure if this would stick, but I am quite satisfied for now.

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• My evil evil form and database library

  Writing a usable form and database library has always been a painful experience. So why bother re-inventing the wheel when there are so many to choose from already? I am writing one mostly for learning purpose. After numerous attempts, I finally get my form and database library in shape. It is nowhere complete, but nor it is perfect, but it is currently the implementation that is closest to my original design. I will keep working on it so it can be used in my personal projects in the future.

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Random Posts

• Estimating the value of pi with a line of Python

  I came across a video on Youtube on Pi day. Coincidently it was about estimating the value of Pi produced by Matt Parker aka standupmaths. While I am not quite interested in knowing the best way to estimate Pi, I am quite interested in the algorithm he showed in the video however. Specifically, I am interested to find out how easy it is to implement in Python.

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• Re-implementing Approximate Nearest Neighbour Search

  Recently I switched my search code to Annoy because the input dataset is huge (7.5mil records with 20k dictionary count). It wasn’t without issues though, however I would probably talk about it next time. In order to figure out what each parameters meant, I spent some time watching through the talk given by the author @fulhack.

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• Development virtual machines on OS X using VirtualBox and Ubuntu

  I have been following this excellent guide written by Benjamin Thomas to set up my virtual machine for development purpose. However, when I am starting to configure a Ubuntu Quantal alpha machine, parts of the guide became inapplicable. Hence, this post is written as a small revision to the previously mentioned guide.

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• Protobuf and dask

  While JSON is a fine data-interchange format, however it does have some limitations. It is well-known for its simplicity, that even a non-programmer can easily compose a JSON file (but humanity will surprise you IRL). Therefore, it is found almost everywhere, from numerous web APIs, to geospatial data (GeoJSON), and even semantic web (RDF/JSON).

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• Deploying docker containers with HAProxy on a VPS

  With most of my stuff more or less set, I guess it is time to start documenting the steps before I forget. So I heard a lot of good things about docker for quite some time, but haven’t really have the time to do it due to laziness (plus my relatively n00b-ness in the field of dev-ops). Just a few months ago, I decided to finally migrate away from webfaction (thanks for all the superb support) to a VPS so I can run more things on it.

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