2014

• Spiraling Number

  Back then in college, we were given a lot of programming practices. These questions usually shows a desired output format, and we were required to write a program to print out the exact thing. Usually it involves printing a matrix of numbers, or symbols etc. For these problems, usually a loop structure or two should solve the problem.

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• Weekend Code Quiz – Easy Template Parser

  A friend of mine recently posted a screenshot containing a code snippet for a fairly straight forward problem. So after reading the solution I suddenly had the itch to propose another solution that I initially thought would be better (SPOILER: Turns out it isn’t). Then mysteriously I stuck myself to my seat and started coding an alternative solution to it instead of playing Diablo 3 just now.

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• Quick HACK 2: Connect to Internet Shortcut

  A really sweet new feature in the recently released update is the ability to change lockscreen shortcut. Unfortunately there is no easy way to change connection with my Jolla unlike my old Nokia N9 (no pun intended). As I have not been using my N9 for quite some time, I was only reminded when I came across this thread on TMO.

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• HACK: Automount sshfs to my Jolla Phone in Ubuntu 14.04

  I haven’t got much time lately, so didn’t write about this new phone that I recently imported. For some reason, this new phone of mine do not act as mass storage device like its predecessors (to certain extend). Thankfully I can still ssh in the phone and this makes it possible to mount it as a sshfs volume.

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• Imperfect Reimplementation of Lists in PHP

  Long long time ago when I was working with Prolog, I was introduced to list. Unlike arrays in most popular programming languages, we weren’t really able to access to a particular member directly. Every list is constructed in a chain-like structure.

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• Some status updates

  There are a lot of things I want to post to both here and my personal blogs. However I was sucked into sanctuary for the most of last month. I guess after a month of playing, it is probably time to slowly resume my personal projects.

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• More Interviewing Questions

  Just survived a job interview, so I should probably celebrate this despite the outcome. Well, considering I was off the job market for a couple of years, I probably has all the reason to be nervous. Anyway, like most geeky serious job interview, there are a test given by the company to the attendees.

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• Visualization of my profile, in (not quite) RDF way

  After a miserable trip back to academic world, I finally re-gained the courage to get back to job-market. For the time spent in university, I spent quite some time reading about Semantic Web and RDF. Then I thought, I should have published more in this format in future. However, that didn’t really happen, mostly because I am too lazy.

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• Quick and Dirty way to manage my VIM config

  Not sure about the others, but the obsession to my coding tools is probably more than I would admit. I have just managed to do a dirty quick hack to manage my VIM configuration settings. While I am sure there are other people doing this, I would like to show my reinvented wheels.

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• What’s so difficult about HTML?

  I am not going to waste time telling stories that inspire this post, as most people would have already heard something similar constantly. This is not a mythbuster kinda post, so don’t expect a scientific proof to the answer of the question. Instead, through this post, I hope to break the impression that claims composing a HTML document is difficult.

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Random Posts

• Yet another Instant Messaging service

  I have recently made my Adium useless by moving all my IM accounts to my beloved Nokia N9. While moving my buddy lists of all major instant messaging services, I did a quick check on each of the contact to see past interaction. It is sort of surprising to see I don’t actually chat with them as frequent as I thought, so why do I “need” my Adium opened all the time?

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• Approximate Neighbour Search in Multiple Dimensions

  In the previous post, I re-implemented Annoy in 2D with some linear algebra maths. Then I spent some time going through some tutorial on vectors, and expanded the script to handle data in 3D and more. So instead of finding gradient, the perpendicular line in the middle of two points, I construct a plane, and find the distance between it and points to construct the tree.

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• Regression with 2-means clustering Annoy (non-scientific)

  So apparently Annoy is now splitting points by using the centroids of 2 means clustering. It is claimed that it provides better results for ANN search, however, how does this impact regression? Purely out of curiosity, I plugged a new point splitting function and generated a new set of points.

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• HACK: Automount sshfs to my Jolla Phone in Ubuntu 14.04

  I haven’t got much time lately, so didn’t write about this new phone that I recently imported. For some reason, this new phone of mine do not act as mass storage device like its predecessors (to certain extend). Thankfully I can still ssh in the phone and this makes it possible to mount it as a sshfs volume.

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• Sorting Multilingual Data

  Been trying my best to stick to the well-known UNIX Philosophy – “Do one thing and do it well”, so I have been breaking down my projects into numerous pieces of small tasks and rely on existing tools whenever possible. One of the existing tool that I use a lot is the GNU sort tool. Generally sort utility is really doing fine and dandy without having to configure anything, at least not until I realize the problem that leads to this post.

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