Due to the huge “geek-factor” associated with my blog, you can expect many snippets of code. I found this awesome plugin called wp-syntax that actually formats it and allows you to see colored syntax!

I love colored syntax when coding. Why? Aside from making it easier to read, its actually a VERY useful tool! Too many times, I’ve been able to fix my code before compiling/running, because the syntax I wrote wasn’t colored. I’d think to myself,

Wait a minute, how come this variable isn’t getting colored? I must of made a mistake somewhere!

Then I’m able to fix it right way. So awesome. Now, here’s hello world in many languages… with color support!

Python

     print "hello world!"

Java

      System.out.println("hello world!");

Javascript

     alert("hello world!");

Visual Basic

     MsgBox("hello world!")

C

     printf("hello world!");

C#

     System.Console.WriteLine("hello world!");

Scheme (one of my personal favourites!)

      (display "hello world!")

PHP

     <?php
         echo "Hello, world!";
     ?>

So awesome..

Every few years, I’d hear news of someone finding a prime number and getting awarded big bucks for doing so. Whenever I heard this kinda news, I’d think about how easy it would be to actually find them myself. I mean, it almost seemed too easy:

      1) Remove all even numbers
      2) Remove all multiples of 5
      3) Check all numbers ending in 3, 7, and 9 if they're prime or not.

So if you have a set of n numbers, taking out all the even numbers would leave you with n/2 numbers. Unfortunately, taking out the multiples of 5 didn’t do much, so its actually leaving you with 2n/5 numbers. My algorithm back in the day had also left out one important fact: How do I actually check if they’re prime?

With project euler, I was forced to actually re-evaluate my algorithm, and you know what? It failed spectacularly! However, it led me to something else. Its this SWEET algorithm called the “Sieve of Eratosthenes”.  Here’s how it goes:

     1) Make a list A of all numbers 1 to n.
     2) Make a list B to hold all the primes you find. The first item will be 2.
     3) Remove ALL multiples of 2 from list A.
     4) The first remaining number will be a prime. Add this to B.
     5) Grab that number and remove all multiples of it from list A.
     6) Repeat 4) and 5) until no numbers are left in List A.

It works perfectly (albiet pretty slow)  and it does its job: getting a list of n primes.  Apparently other people thought so themselves, so much in fact, that they actually wrote a poem about it!

Sift the Two’s and sift the Three’s,
The Sieve of Eratosthenes.
When the multiples sublime,
The numbers that remain are Prime.

Isn’t that cool? It even rhymes!

When I was learning “Computer and Network Security”, I actually learnt about another prime number generator. It uses a few complicated theories, namly Fermat’s little theorem and the Fermat primality test (aww man, I could of used this in my first algorithm!). Its good and it works, but its not as cool as the Sieve.

In other news, I can’t believe I just blogged about prime numbers. I am living up to my blog’s tagline already!

So I’m geeking around the internet, like I usually do, when I stumble upon this awesome site. Project Euler! Pretty much, its a set of math questions that are ONLY solvable with a computer. So what does it mean for a young, industrious programmer like myself? Fun!

There’s 229 problems, and I’ve solved 27 so far… as you can see, I’ve got a long way to go.  Some of them are easy:

If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000.

Fairly easy to solve. Find all multiples of 3 or 5 and sum them up. Done. Now lets examine another problem:


Each new term in the Fibonacci sequence is generated by adding the previous two terms. By starting with 1 and 2, the first 10 terms will be:

1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, …

Find the sum of all the even-valued terms in the sequence which do not exceed four million.

This is where it gets complicated. The Fibonacci sequence actually grows pretty quick, which means the number will actually in the computer’s buffer, resulting in an “out of range” exception pretty quickly. Which means you can’t do a simple Fibonacci sequence linearly.

As the problems get more complicated, the chance that you can brute-force the answers become less likely. One of my favorite questions was the monopoly one:


In the game, Monopoly, find the three most popular squares when using two 4-sided dice.


I actually built a simulator to solve it, where I could change the dice easily. So I ran it for a 6-sided dice (like the ones we usually use), and found the following stats (10 million rolls):

1. Jail - 622228
2. Illinois Ave - 318336
3. New York Ave - 309739
4. GO - 308705
5. B&O Railroad - 307718
6. Reading Railroad - 297163
7. Tennessee Ave - 293212
8. Pennsylvania Railroad - 291143
9. Free Parking - 287501
10. Kentucky Ave - 283870
11. Water Works - 279720
12. St. James Place - 279563
13. Indiana Ave - 273179
14. Atlantic Ave - 269697
15. St Charles Place - 269678
16. Pacific Ave - 268251
17. Ventnor Ave - 267982
18. Boardwalk - 262216
19. North Carolina Ave - 261937
20. Electric Company - 259929
21. Marvin Gardens - 258568
22. Community Chest 2 - 258082
23. Pennsylvania Ave - 250309
24. Virginia Avenue - 246854
25. Short line - 242476
26. Community Chest 3 - 238379
27. States Ave - 237184
28. Vermont Ave - 232893
29. Income Tax 1 - 231599
30. Connecticut Ave - 230336
31. Oriental Ave - 226835
32. Park Place - 219057
33. Luxury Tax - 218509
34. Baltic Ave - 216265
35. Mediterranean Ave - 213695
36. Community Chest 1 - 189488
37. Chance 2 - 103436
38. Chance 1 - 87370
39. Chance 3 - 86898
40. Go To Jail - 0

Although, I may have to fix it up. From experience, I know going to jail shouldn’t be that low! All in all, these questions are a great way to practise programming when working with a new language. So try it out, you might enjoy it as much as I have.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions from my buddies, asking how to actually start a blog like mine, with their own domain name and everything, so I decided to make a simple guide to follow.

1. Find a domain
   You need a domain. This is fairly easy to do:

   Think_of_a_name
   While (name_is_taken):
        Think_of_a_new_name
   Register_name
   

   You can search for names at Go Daddy, however, I don’t like their rates as much, and the entire process there is rather confusing (they try to make you buy so many things!) which is why I prefer going to Lunar Pages.

2. Find a host
   Once you find a domain name, you register and pay for it. But you still need a place to host your website. A lunar pages, they actually give you a free domain when you purchase some hosting, so you save some money there.
3. Now we get a bit technical
   Once you have a domain and host, you are pretty much set to go. You’ll receive emails detailing how to connect via FTP, upload files to your site, etc… At this point, any html file you put on your webspace will appear. However, most people don’t know a thing about HTML, and even if you did, would you even have the skills to make a site that looks good and doesn’t crash? Most likely not. This is where wordpress comes into play.
4. Wordpress
   Wordpress is the software that’s powering my entire site. Since I am in computer science, I’ve been creating my own websites for years, then just a few days ago, I played around a bit with wordpress, and realized the power I’ve been missing! It does everything for you, and for users who don’t even know html? No problem, it does it all for you! Its even easy to set up! There’s only 2 requirements:
   1. PHP
   2. MySQL

   If you have these two pieces of software on your server, then you are pretty much set. Wordpress is even kind enough to include a very awesome set of instructions that are very easy to follow. If you feel that your technical skills are up to par, try the Famous 5-Minute Installation!
   

5. Customization
   Now here’s the fun part. The default installation is rather plain, so you can try customizing the layout to suit your tastes. You pretty much download themes, unzip them, and then upload them to your /wp-content/themes/ folder.  Once its uploaded, in the Wordpress site admin, you go to Appearance>Themes and just click on the one you want for a small preview, then click “activate”. You can download themes from the wordpress site, or you can search for sites that rank them. I personally didn’t like any of the ones I found there, so I went to digg and searched for “wordpress themes“, which gave me many many resources.

And there you go, you have a blog! For most people, this would be sufficient, but I still wasn’t satisfied. I actually ended up modifying many many aspects of my current theme (gHack), mostly because I’m usually very picky. I actually ended up downloading a lot of plugins and modifying the php (which I had to learn on the go) to do what I wanted it to do.

A quick list of enhancements I’ve done:

• Added my tweeter feed
• Got Google adsense up and running (made $0.31 already!)
• Got gravatars working for everyone (globally recognized avatar)

All in all, I am quite satisfyed with my results so far. So good luck on your own site!

I’ve finally decided to start up a blog. I’ve blogged on LiveJournal for a number of years now, but I realized it sorta has its limits:

1. I don’t have my own domain.
   
   • I bought my own domain last year, and I havn’t really utilized it to its fullest potential. Its great having a place to host your files, and I used it for a while as a website for all the courses I taught. But with my own domain, it makes it easier for people to actually find me and it helps “market” myself a lot better.
2. Its not professional.
   
   • LiveJournal just didn’t seem professional enough. I mean, I still had the silly username I’ve been carrying around for years. The only people able to find/read it were my friends, and it felt more like a personal diary then anything. My friends have always been posting “diary-like” content, but I’ve always refrained from that.

After going to CUSEC, I realized that most of the speakers had a blog. These were a VERY smart group of people, and by reading their blogs, you learn so much. Some of my favourites include Jeff Atwood, Zed Shaw, Francis Hwang, Leah Culver (Co-founder of Pownce and the girl who got a free laptop by etching ads into her laptop) , Joey Devilla (He has two!)

The final straw, however, was during my interview with Direct Energy. They actually make all their employees (in their Graduate Developement Program) have a blog. Its a great way to keep track of what you’ve been learning and what you’ve been doing.

So there you have it. My first professional blog. Well not “professional” in a stuffy bureaucratic way, but in the sense that it will showcase all my nerdy ambitions, ideas, and adventures, and man do I have a lot of those.