PHP

• Working Environment Setup, for 2020

  In recent years, I start to make my development environment decouple from the tools delivered by the package manager used by the operating system. The tools (compiler, interpreters, libraries etc) are usually best left unmodified so other system packages that rely on them keeps working as intended. Also another reason for the setup is I wanted to follow the latest release as much as possible, which cannot be done unless I enroll myself to a rolling release distro.

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• Random Data Generator and Reader

  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.

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• Hitting a nail with the wrong hammer (my writing tools)

  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.

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• Dragon Curve

  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.

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• Spiraling Number

  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.

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• Weekend Code Quiz – Easy Template Parser

  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.

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• Imperfect Reimplementation of Lists in PHP

  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.

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• More Interviewing Questions

  Just survived a job interview, so I should probably celebrate this despite the outcome. Well, considering I was off the job market for a couple of years, I probably has all the reason to be nervous. Anyway, like most geeky serious job interview, there are a test given by the company to the attendees.

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• Revisiting Fizz Buzz in PHP

  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.

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• Update in tools

  It is very much expected that there will be endless stream of new (and often times better) tools introduced to solve the same set of problems. While I am slowly resuming my programming work, and in the process of reviving my very much dead postgrad project, I found some alternative to the tools I had used in the past. I suppose I shall just jot them down here so that there’s a reference for later use.

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Random Posts

• Linting a libsvm-formatted data

  While working on a text classification task, I spent quite some time preparing the training set for a given document collection. The project is supposed to be a pure golang implementation, so after some quick searching I found some libraries that are either a wrapper to libsvm, or a re-implementation. So I happily started to prepare my training set in the libsvm format.

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• Adding complexity to the bot: threads and processes

  Being new to asyncio, after publishing the previous post on running multiple applications in one event loop, I also cross posted it to the discussion board for feedback. So apparently instead of cramming everything to the same event loop, it would be better if each application run on a separate thread. That makes sense, considering all the code that was written for that.

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• Quick HACK 2: Connect to Internet Shortcut

  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.

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• Random Color Cloud

  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.

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• Further Hack on the Multi-Dimensional Approximate Neighbour Search

  Traversing a tree structure often involves writing a recursive function. However, Python isn’t the best language for this purpose. Therefore I started flattening the tree into a key-value dictonary structure. Logically it is still a tree, but it is physically stored as a dictionary. Therefore it is now easier to write a simple loop to traverse it.

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