Skip to main content

Diary

  • First day as a TA at Coding Dojo
  • Worked up through the automated testing portion of the Django official tutorial
  • Didn't have time to do any algorithms -- learned about a path-finding problem (2D array represents connections between nodes -- determine whether there is a path from A to B for arbitrary A and B)
    • e.g. for nodes A, B, and C
      • [ [0, 1, 0] , [0 , 0, 1], [0, 0, 0] ]
      • First entry says A is connected to B, second that B is connected to C -- so there's a path from A to C.
      • The connection relationship is not robust.  A can be connected to B without B being connected to A.  It must however in some sense give rise to another relationship that is at least transitive.  If A and B are connected, and B and C are connected, then I can get from A to C.  This does not mean, however, that I can get back from C to A.
      • Initial thought was do something with recursion.  Too complicated.  And what if you have loops?  Now it seems you just need a way to translate this information into a more manageable data structure -- for example the dynamic connectivity data structure.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's a Date

I guess I should really be putting these things up in GitHub.  The way I see it, the coding journal is just a place to share the code I write or study along with any notes I have about it.  It's sort of a documentation LiveJournal, if you will. Anyway, this is a "study" for my project idea: create an app that will prompt the user for two dates, then calculate the difference between them. The burden of this study is twofold: (1) convert dates in standard American form (e.g. December 15, 1993) into dates in standard American numeric form (e.g. 12/15/1993); (2) create a numerical representation of the date. To process the date, I started with a list of the months.  I then used a loop to create a dictionary that would attach a value to each month. Next I had to parse the user entry (I haven't added any debugging for incorrect entries yet). I did so by splitting the entry into "raw" data.  I used my dictionary to process the month name into a number, str...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nailing Down The Meaning Of "This" In JavaScript

Sense-certainty itself has thus to be asked: What is the This? If we take it in the two-fold form of its existence, as the Now and as the Here, the dialectic it has in it will take a form as intelligible as the This itself. To the question, What is the Now? we reply, for example, the Now is night-time. To test the truth of this certainty of sense, a simple experiment is all we need: write that truth down. A truth cannot lose anything by being written down, and just as little by our preserving and keeping it. If we look again at the truth we have written down, look at it now, at this noon-time, we shall have to say it has turned stale and become out of date.   Hegel,  Phenomenology of Spirit  S. 95 Overview In philosophy, English words like "this" are referred to as indexicals, with the implication that (A) they are used to point at something and (B) what they point at is determined by context (just as, when I point at someone, who I am pointing at is determined ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Getting Geodata From Google's API

The apps I'm going to be analyzing are part of Dr. Charles Severance's MOOC on Python and Databases and work together according to the following structure (which applies both in this specific case and more generally to any application that creates and interprets a database using online data). The data source, in this case, is Google's Google Maps Geocoding API.  The "package" has two components: geoload.py  and geodump.py .  geoload.py  reads a list of locations from a file -- addresses for which we would like geographical information -- requests information about them from Google, and stores the information on a database ( geodata.db ).  geodump.py  reads and parses data from the database in JSON, then loads that into a javascript file.  The javascript is then used to create a web page on which the data is visualized as a series of points on the world-map.  Dr. Severance's course focuses on Python, so I'm only going to work my way through ...
Post a Comment
Read more