Notes on codes, projects and everything
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 often struggle to get my Javascript code organized, and have tried numerous ways to do so. I have tried putting relevant code into classes and instantiate as needed, then abuse jQuery’s data() method to store everything (from scalar values to functions and callbacks). Recently, after knowing (briefly) how a jQuery plugin should be written, it does greatly simplify my code.
After coded enough Javascript few months back, I found that there are a couple of functions that I kept re-using in different projects. Therefore I took some time to refactor them and re-arrange them into a single file. The common code that I keep reusing even today consists of functions that does prototypical inheritance, scope maintenance, some jquery stuff, google maps api stuff and some general ajax application related code.
Maintaining state in Javascript is not too difficult once you catch the idea. However, as I am not a super brilliant programmer, it takes me some time to find a way to maintain state as YUI Event does in jQuery.
After the last post, I found that it may be fun to write a wrapper for YUI in order to make it behave like jQuery. Therefore, the code below is clearly mainly for self-amusement and is not intended to be used in production projects. However, through coding this, I found that although the difference in design, but YUI is obviously capable to do what jQuery offers (if not more). I will not continue working on this so whoever interested may just copy and paste the code to further developing it.
I am starting to like programming in Javascript, especially after understanding more about how Javascript handles scopes. Surprisingly this take me like a year to figure out how scope is managed. The result of the findings is that I start doing a lot of experiments and discovered more interesting stuff through them.
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.
Just happened to see this post a few months ago, and the author created another cloud that uses almost the same technique to ‘visualize’ a list of countries. The author uses PHP to generate the cloud originally and I thought I may be able to do in javascript. After some quick coding I managed to produce something similar to the first example, source code after the jump.
Often times one would have to write code to evaluate logical statements. For example, given statement p and q, what is p implies q? As there’s no operator for implication in PHP, one would have to rewrite the statement that consists only in NOT (!), AND (&&) and OR (||) operators. When there are a huge load of these statements, code can be difficult to read.
Javascript is getting so foreign to me these days, but mostly towards a better direction. So I recently got myself to learn react through work and the JSX extension makes web development bearable again. On the other hand, I picked up a little bit on Vue.js but really hated all the magic involved (No I don’t enjoy putting in code into quotes).
I am starting to like programming in Javascript, especially after understanding more about how Javascript handles scopes. Surprisingly this take me like a year to figure out how scope is managed. The result of the findings is that I start doing a lot of experiments and discovered more interesting stuff through them.
While following through the Statistical Learning course, I came across this part on doing regression with boosting. Then reading through the material, and going through it makes me wonder, the same method may be adapted to Erik Bernhardsson‘s annoy algorithm.
I’m not sure why Windows Media Player 11 doesn’t like mp4/aac format but not being able to transfer my tracks in mp4 through MTP to my N81 really piss me off. At first I installed Songbird 1.0.0 to try synchronizing the tracks through the MTP addon but it doesn’t even play *.mp4 tracks out of the box under Windows XP SP3 (although it claimed otherwise). Weird thing happens when I was trying to synchronize anyway by having the files renamed to *.mp4 extension and it succeeded but without any meta-tag information.