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.
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?
So I first heard about Panda probably a year ago when I was in my previous job. It looked nice, but I didn’t really get the chance to use it. So practically it is a library that makes data looks like a mix of relational database table and excel sheet. It is easy to do query with it, and provides a way to process it fast if you know how to do it properly (no, I don’t, so I cheated).
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.
While the previous file structure works well, I decided to tune some details before deploying the latest WordPress release. Besides that, I also started a new theme development project after my last theme which was developed more than 2 years ago. Thankfully, everything seems to work so far.
After comparing my own implementation of MVC with CodeIgniter’s, now I’m comparing Kohana’s and Zend’s. I have just shifted from CodeIgniter to Kohana recently in work and is currently learning on how to use Zend Framework to build my web-app. As everybody knows, Zend Framework is more like a collection of library classes than a framework a la Ruby on Rails, using MVC in Zend Framework would require one to begin from bootstrapping stage. However, in Kohana, just like other frameworks, bootstrapping is done by the framework itself so the developer will get an installation that almost just works (after a little bit of configuration).