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.
Recently I am being assigned to work on a FSM based workflow system to enable my other colleagues to use it in their application. I am rather impressed with the simplicity of the workflow system (initially designed by my Technical Director) and decided to post some notes here. The workflow system was developed for CodeIgniter PHP framework and Drupal CMS.
In the last part, I implemented a couple of primitive functions so that they can be applied in the following chapters. The second chapter of the book, is titled “Do it again, and again, and again…”. The title already hints that readers will deal with repetitions throughout the chapter.
Implementing a Information Retrieval system is a fun thing to do. However, doing it efficiently is not (at least to me). So my first few attempts didn’t really end well (mostly uses just Go/golang with some bash tricks here and there, with or without a database). Then I jumped back to Python, which I am more familiar with and was very surprised with all the options available. So I started with Pandas and Scikit-learn combo.
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.
It is very difficult to like the way vim handle plugins by default, so I was really thrilled to find out about pathogen when a geek I followed tweeted about it. It took me some time to actually re-organize my current configuration to this new format. Then I thought why not reorganize my .vimrc as well, as my current version looks a bit cryptic after a while.