So the second time I'm in a cyber cafe. In certain respects private universities aren't much better than public ones. We still haven't got ID cards, which means no net/linux access. Which means no coding too. Other than that its been pretty good, playing football and table tennis. But a bit tiring too. Its been raining a lot today, which means there isn't much to do. We had the first couple of lectures today, but nothing new was taught.…

Well, I'm here, or I've been here for 5 days now. Since we haven't got ID cards yet, there is no computer access, so I'm writing this from a cyber cafe. The last few days have been a bit boring. With no studies, playing and reading seem to be the only things you can do in 24 HOURS!. I haven't written any code in days, but I have managed to read Hutton's Haskell book, which is really good.…

I Gitted Graffiti yesterday, and made an error in adding the files to version control, so I decided to undo the changes and because Git complained, I added -f. git rm graffiti -rf BOOM! Graffiti is gone. Except for the basic style parser which I was writing at that time, which was saved by Kate. I'm not blaming Git, just my stupidity. I usually don't version control as soon as I begin a project, since I like to get the structure right, without having really bad log comments.…

In the past few weeks, as I've tried and failed at various projects, there has been a realisation that you can only go so far with random reading and coding. The first few years of programming are spent coding projects pretty minor on the algorithms/data structures side. But when you finally start growing out of it and when 'cool' projects for you start to become more complex, a seemingly invisible wall smacks you.…

Thursday morning, I saw the problems and took a printout of the Flyswatter. Then I spent about 3 hours figuring out the right area calculations, without success. Then I tried hacking away at the other 2 problems for a total of 1.75 hours. Again failed. Result: A total brain burnout Feeling: Really down for my not so leet algorithmic skills. Lesson learned: I seriously need 4 years of formal computer science education.…

It turns out parsing CSS according to specifications is no mean feat. So I am going to stall that for a moment, or implement a bare bones parser specifically written for Graffiti, and just plow along with Graffiti and doing what I can do, properly. Maybe later ( read quite a few months ) I'll write a nice SAC compliant CSS parser and hook it into Graffiti. Whatever I want to do, things aren't going to be moving fast.…

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This is with reference to the Google Code Jam practice problem. SPOILER WARNING: DISCUSSION ON THE SOLUTION BELOW This problem initially seemed vexing. After a little bit of thought about using bit twiddling to represent directions, generating the right codes was easy. If you have any experience with hexadecimal numbers, it should strike you that the direction table with 4 directions each of which can be yes or no, is a big hint that bit twiddles are exactly what is needed.…

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon is a crime novel. Except it's written from the point of view of a 15 year old autistic boy. This book was actually released in 2003 so I'm a bit late for the review, but I just stumbled upon it a few days ago at a friend's place. And the bright colour and really long rambling title really intrigued me.…

CamenDesign: A List Of People Who Need To Stop Writing Software I'd also add Creative Nero, Adobe PDF Reader and Falcon. Half of "Windows Pain" comes from the crummy applications sitting on top of it. …