Highlights
I started looking into gnuplot and octave as a solution to my partial differential equations homework on Tuesday. I did some tutorials and looked at some samples, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I really started to pick up an idea of how these tools interact. By today, I was able to generate some Fourier series (sort of felt like hand assembly, but it was a reasonable amount of work). I think I will run with it and see how far this free software can go. A tutorial is coming.
Topcoder was pretty frustrating. It came down to the wire when I finally found my bug and got my general algorithm working for the 2nd problem in 2nd division. In the end, I missed the case where you have to return -1 in the case where there were no perfect squares. I don’t think anyone challenged me, the code is just unreadable I’m afraid. Particularly time wasting was type converting strings. I’ve seen it done with stringstreams but it’s an indirect and clunky way of doing things compared to casting the string to a C string and using library functions to convert, which I ended up googling.
Thoughts
I’ve dug into some open source code this week, a one JaWE XPDL editor, which can be configured to build different versions. One particular annoyance is the fact that the community version starts up with a 10-second popup window that cannot be bypassed. I think this is such lame functionality written by jerks, so I found the evil code section and commented it out. I think while people are constantly looking for the next big project to release to the world, at least try not to be a jerk about what you do release.
Targets
- Get bluetooth working on my laptop
- Code up some Cake PHP
- Get some exercises in
