I have come to the alarming realization that it's been so long since I've used Matlab, that I had forgotten that 2D arrays exist, and that they're different from the arrays of arrays that you might use to approximate them. Which means that I've been foolishly using arrays …
read moreBy default, Julia will copy an array by reference. This means that if you change any values in the copy, the original will also change. For example:
> x = [1, 2, 3]
> z = x
> z[1] = 10
> print(x)
[10, 2, 3]
You can avoid this by using copy():
> x = [1 …I had briefly used regular expressions, to check the format of a string, on a previous day. I got into a bit more for today's task, where there were a lot of inputs of the form:
light orange bags contain 1 dark maroon bag, 3 dim maroon bags, 5 striped …I enjoy Advent of Code every year. I like the small daily puzzles, and I certainly wouldn't want anything long and complicated every day. However, in order to add a bit of challenge, without resorting to racing, this year I'm using a language I don't really know. That's right, it's …
read moreI made a disastrous attempt at upgrading my Ubuntu distribution today. It failed partway through, leaving things in a horrible broken state. I use XMonad as my windows manager, mostly because I hate having to move things around with a mouse. But today it especially paid off, because the half-upgraded …
read moreSuppose you have a differential equation that you want to solve numerically. An approach you might take is collocation, which is based on the idea that an unknown function $u(z)$ can be approximated by a sum of $N+1$ basis functions $\phi_n(z)$: $$ u(z) \approx u_N(z) = \sum_ …
read moreSuppose you need to know if a given number is a multiple of, say, 5. There's a simple solution to this problem: the modulo operator. In many languages, it looks like this:
x % 5
And what it returns is the remainder when dividing x by 5. If that remainder is …
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I have an exhibit at the Vancouver Mini Maker Faire this weekend (June 6-7, 2015). It's a DIY Spectrophotometer, that is very obviously home-made, but allows you to see the absorption spectrum of different liquid samples. For example, if you look at the spectrum, you can see for yourself that …
read moreSuppose you're iterating through a list, and you want to remove elements under some condition. This seems pretty easy: you've got an element, and python lists have a remove method that you can call with that element.
However... let's try it with a simple example:
>> mylist = range(10)
>> for x …I had planned to write a blog post about how great Julia is. I spent many years using Matlab, both in grad school and in finance. Since then, I've been using NumPy for mathy things, but it feels really awkward, since it's just sitting on top of another language, with …
read moreIf you take any integer and rearrange the digits however you like, the difference between the original number and the rearranged number will always be divisible by 9.
For example:
number = 12345
rearranged = 43215
difference = 43215 - 12345 = 30870
difference / 9 = 3430
More generally, you can do the same with numbers …
read moreWe all know that you should avoid writing the same code over and over: put it in a function and just call that function whenever you need it. But what if what you need is a class with a whole bunch of really similar methods, each with a different name …
read moreIn Python, you can assign a default value to an optional varible like so:
def myFunction(x, y = 0):
print x + y
myFunction can be called with either one or two arguments. If only one argument is supplied, y will have a value of 0.
This is all perfectly straightforward …
read moreMy initial approach to the tiling problem was to find all the possible configurations, calculate a measure of the distance between same-colour tiles for each, and then select the configuration with the maximum distance. While this does reliably find the optimal solution, it also very quickly becomes infeasible as the …
read moreWe have a play-mat: eight rubber tiles, two of each colour, that fit together. We had put it together in a 4x2 arrangement, without considering the colours. The result was ... displeasing. Two pink tiles were right next to each other, but all the other pairs were separated. It just looked …
read moreInputting information through web forms is really easy under Twisted web. You just have to set up render_GET to display a form, where each input element has a name (e.g. "name", "email", whatever). Then, render_POST, taking an argument of request, can access these values as follows:
name = request.args …