Notes on codes, projects and everything
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).
Previously, I started practising recursions by implementing a type check on lat (list of atoms), and ismember
(whether an atom is a member of a given lat). Then in the third chapter, named “Cons the Magnificent”, more list manipulation methods are being introduced.
Recently I find some of my pet projects share a common pattern, they all are based on some kind of grids. So I find myself writing similar piece of code over and over again. While re-inventing wheels is quite fun, especially when you learn new way of getting things done with every iteration, it is actually quite tedious after a while.
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.
I saw this article from alistapart, which is about Javascript’s prototypal object orientation. So the article mentioned Douglas Crawford, and I was immediately reminded about my struggle in understanding the language itself. Back then I used to also refer to his site for a lot of notes in Javascript. So I went back to have a quick read, and found this article that discusses the similarity between Javascript and Lisp.
Sometimes, letting a piece of code evolving by itself without much planning does not usually end well. However I was quite pleased with a by-product of it and I am currently formalizing it. So the by-product is some sort of DSL for a rule engine that I implemented to process records. It started as some lambda functions in Python but eventually becomes something else.
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.
Often times, I am dealing with JSONL files, though panda’s DataFrame is great (and blaze to certain extend), however it is offering too much for the job. Most of the received data is in the form of structured text and I do all sorts of work with them. For example checking for consistency, doing replace based on values of other columns, stripping whitespace etc.
I came across a video on Youtube on Pi day. Coincidently it was about estimating the value of Pi produced by Matt Parker aka standupmaths. While I am not quite interested in knowing the best way to estimate Pi, I am quite interested in the algorithm he showed in the video however. Specifically, I am interested to find out how easy it is to implement in Python.
Traversing a tree structure often involves writing a recursive function. However, Python isn’t the best language for this purpose. Therefore I started flattening the tree into a key-value dictonary structure. Logically it is still a tree, but it is physically stored as a dictionary. Therefore it is now easier to write a simple loop to traverse it.
A new day, and a new post on job application. So this time instead of asking a snippet, I was actually asked to deliver some sort of a full application. Not sure why this was required, but I had fun creating them nonetheless. Though I would say I am not really a fan of creating visual stuff though (oh the crappy animation nearly killed me).
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).
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.
After delaying for quite some time, I think I should start the project before I get bored with it. The project will be either hosted on this current domain (coolsilon.com) at least for now and will probably move to another domain if needed. The site will be either a blog aggregator or just a simple article submission site that works kinda like digg / reddit, however, to be promoted to the frontpage the submission would have to impress the opposite group.