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 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).
This post continued from this post. Finally I have found some time to start developing my pet project using Zend Framework. After getting the controller to work the way I am more familiar (comparing to Kohana which I used at work) with, the next step is to get it to output some data.
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.
After being frustrated of not getting consistent and accurate result via standard DOM methods especially html_element.getAttribute('key'); and html_element.setAttribute('key', 'value');, I came across some YUI library components that provides abstractions to various DOM methods. Some interesting DOM-related tools covered in this post are YAHOO.util.Element, YAHOO.util.DOM and YAHOO.util.Selector.
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…).