Notes on codes, projects and everything
In recent years, I start to make my development environment decouple from the tools delivered by the package manager used by the operating system. The tools (compiler, interpreters, libraries etc) are usually best left unmodified so other system packages that rely on them keeps working as intended. Also another reason for the setup is I wanted to follow the latest release as much as possible, which cannot be done unless I enroll myself to a rolling release distro.
(more…)Just recently I volunteered to do a pre-101 kinda workshop for people wanting to learn programming. I had done this a few times in the past, but in different settings and goals in mind. The whole structure predates the sessions but I can’t remember when I first created them.
(more…)Usually I take about a week to learn a new language so I can start doing some real work with it. After all a programming language (at least the high level and dynamic ones) is just assignment, calculation, branching, looping and reuse (and in certain cases, concurrency/parallelism, not gonna dive deep in defining the difference though). Well, that was true until I started learning Rust, partly for my own leisure.
I finally put in some time and effort learning myself a bit of Rust. Though I am still struggling with ownership and lifetimes (which is essentially everything about the language, to be honest), I find it more interesting compared to Golang, which is relatively boring, though being functional (no pun intended). While learning the language, the one thing I came across often is the Option
enum, then I remembered that I read something about Monad.
I was asked to evaluate fuzzy c-means to find out whether it is a good clustering algorithm for my MPhil project. So I spent the whole afternoon reading through some tutorial to get some basic understanding. Then I thought why not implement it in Clojure because it doesn’t look too complicated (I was so wrong…).
A few years ago, I was asked to build a game or simulation (alongside 2048) as a part of a job application. Being very impressed with Explorable Explanations, I implemented Conway’s Game of life with Javascript and jQuery (that was before ES6 became popular). Then I made a very simple grid maker jQuery plugin to dynamically generate a grid of divs. If you check the source code, you may realize I rely on Underscore.js a lot back then.
(more…)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.
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).
The Sports Tracker app for my awesome Nokia N9 is not receiving any updates and doesn’t look like things are going to change any time soon. Recently the development team at Sports Tracker published a status update post and sadly there’s no mention of N9 port at all. It’s really sad considering how incomplete the N9 port is at the moment (horrible GPS positioning, no pedometer to name a few).