It’s time to get back to discovering how much math and python I’ve forgotten… Problem #9 Find the only Pythagorean triplet (a,b,c where a < b < c and a^2 + b^2 = c^2) where a + b + c = 1000. The first thing I decided to do was figure out some bounds based [...]
I took a break from projecteuler to whip up a webOS application before my Tahoe Rim Trail Thru-hike. Upon returning I started skiming some technical books and started playing around with the Facebook Puzzles. In general, starting lots of threads is exciting and gives me the feeling that I am learning a lot; however, I [...]
I don’t know anyone (though not doubt they exist) who debates the merits of natural languages and chooses which one to communicate with based on characteristics such as whether they’re fusional vs. agglutinative, but I know plenty of people who discuss the virtues of various computer programming languages and think one is better than the [...]
I finished version 0.1 of my first Palm webOS application last weekend. The Palm Pre has a GPS chip in it but there are no applications that expose the raw data, as a dedicated GPS would. As I’m about to embark on a 9 day hike around the rim of Lake Tahoe, I decided to [...]
I got ahead of myself last post and skipped problem 3. Maybe it’s because it wasn’t that interesting: what’s the largest prime factor of 600851475143? Being an odd number meant 2 was not the largest prime factor, and no even numbers are prime so this simple trial division function seemed to work pretty well: def [...]
As I work through these projecteuler problems, it’s become apparent that my brain tends towards a particular style of solution. When I know one way to solve a problem, I tend to just implement it, as I want to get to the next one. In the future, I’m going to start trying to find multiple [...]
Problem 2 from projecteuler requested the sum of all the even Fibonacci numbers below 4 million. I had seen references to “generators” in some of the Python howtos and after further reading, this seemed like a reasonable place to try them out. def fibGenerator(): fib0 = 0 fib1 = 1 while True: yield fib1 fibNext [...]
I’ve started working through the problems at projecteuler, using Python. After playing around with Erlang for a while, I began to dislike the way the programming methodologies were baked into the language. It’s not that I disagreed with them, but sometimes it’s overkill to HAVE to do things via the idioms of assign once and [...]
While working with a friend on a project, I received a chunk of data consisting of 122443 schools/parishes/colleges along with their primary and secondary colors (in hexadecimal). I hacked together a simple color quantizer that converted the colors to the 216 color web safe palette. If the color combinations are given, 1 per row, formatted [...]
I was recently cc’d on an e-mail containing a code review request, just so I’d be aware of an upcoming change to the data returned from an API used by my code. A little while later one of my co-workers commented, “he wrote a whole parser, very C like.” Prior to that, I hadn’t planned [...]
