Notes on codes, projects and everything
Another day, another programming assessment test. This time I was asked to generate some random data, then examine them to get their data type. Practically it is not a very difficult thing to do and I could probably complete it in fewer lines. I am pretty sure there are better ways to do this, as usual though.
I just failed a programming assessment test miserably yesterday and thought I should at least document it down. However, the problem with this is that the questions are copyrighted, so I guess I would write it from another point of view. So the main reason I failed was because I chose the wrong strategy to the problem, thinking it should be solution but as I put in time to that I ended up creating more problems.
The Nand2Tetris part I at coursera is very much my first completed course. It was so fun to actually work through the material and it feels amazing to know how simple it is to actually build a computer from scratch. While it is simple, it doesn’t mean the course itself is easy though. I was struggling to get the CPU wired up properly that I spent two to three days just to get it working.
I really don’t know how to start explaining what is a Dragon Curve. However, I find it is interesting enough after finding out that there’s actually a fixed pattern of occurrence. Therefore I spent some time writing a series of scripts to plot the generated fractal into a graph. What I didn’t expect is, the series get really complicated after a while.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So my cheat with dask worked fine and dandy, until I started inspecting the output (which was to be used as an input for another script). While the script seemed to work fine, however when I started to parse each line I was hit with some funny syntax errors. After some quick inspection I found some of the lines was not printed completely.
Just happened to see this post a few months ago, and the author created another cloud that uses almost the same technique to ‘visualize’ a list of countries. The author uses PHP to generate the cloud originally and I thought I may be able to do in javascript. After some quick coding I managed to produce something similar to the first example, source code after the jump.
After shifting all my instant messaging accounts to my Nokia N9, I stopped getting email alerts via Adium. Therefore, when I finally remember to check my mailboxes, they are already loaded with exploding amount of mails (mostly junk and newsletter though). I don’t fancy doing my email stuff with my device, and don’t feel like installing a webmail checker to my browser, hence this simple little script is written for my phone.
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.
Call me a cheapskate, as I still have not subscribe to a mobile data plan after purchasing my second smartphone, namely Nokia N9. There’s this ‘allow background connections’ option but it doesn’t care whether the connected network is a WLAN network or mobile data network. After finding out that Nokia has no interest in creating another separate option so that each type of network has their respective ‘allow background connections’ switch, I decided to make one for my own.