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 […]
It seems that one of the canonical examples of the power/simplicity/elegance etc. of functional languages/recursion tends to be an implementation of Quicksort. In Pragmatic Programming Erlang it appears on page 62. qsort([]) -> []; qsort([Pivot|T]) -> qsort([X || X []; ([Pivot|T]) -> QSort([X || X Q = fun([],F) -> []; ([Pivot|T],F) -> F([X || X […]
