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.
Back then, when I was still working on my postgraduate degree research, I used RDF, which was the preferred format in the world of Semantic Web to represent data. I eventually dropped the degree, and stopped following the development of the related technology and standards. Until I volunteered to update the import script for popit when I was looking for the next job/project.
(more…)This is the second part of the golang learning rant log. Previously on (note (code cslai)) I managed to make each line in the CSV into a hash map. So today I am going to make it into JSON Lines.
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.
Back then when I was attending a job interview, I was asked to write a Fizz Buzz program to prove that my coding ability. There was only a pen and a piece of paper, so basically means there’s no way I can refer to the documentation for the API syntax. Fortunately I somehow managed to remember and not screw up.
Ever wanted to find the number of days between two dates without counting weekend (Saturdays and Sundays)? In PHP you typically needs to do a lot of calculation and a lot of factors needs to be considered. Therefore, in the end you will end up having a whole bunch of code that you will probably start asking yourself whether you are programming a web-calendar or something similar.