For you, the reader, there should be more stuff to look at and read. Neat! If you’re not interested in seeing the things I stumble across as I look around the internet, you can view just the old-style articles (without the tumble-ness) in the articles section. There’s a feed of those available too. Planet SUCS now points at the articles feed (as I don’t want to fill it with tumble posts). If you currently only read this blog via Planet SUCS and you’d like to see the new tumble posts, then just subscribe to the main feed.

I still have a few tweaks to make here and there - posting digests of delicious links weekly, perhaps integrating Twitter somehow, but the basics are all in place. Enjoy!

I realised that a potential solution would be to have a kind of status update protocol, that all of the status update sites can conform to (some can have their own extensions, of course, such as pictures/locations, etc). Then people can host their own status update systems, much the way they host blogs now, or you can use one of the many ready-hosted services. The fact that all of these systems conform to the same protocol means that if, say, I used Twitter for my updates, I could still add you as a friend even if you were using your own self-hosted update system, and see your updates within my Twitter dashboard (and vice-versa).

Thoughts? Ideas? Anyone know if anything like this is happening already? Is there a big hole in my idea?

In short, I failed miserably! I did well to begin with, keeping up with the contest and sometimes posting in the wee small hours of the morning in order to get a post in. And then I pretty much dropped off the radar. I think mainly I ran out of things I really wanted to write about (or at least, write reasonable entries about). I’m sure if I had more of a tumblelog-style blog (where I’d post links, videos, pictures that I’ve found and linked) I’dve had more than enough material to keep me going. However, I have now developed a backlog of things I want to post about and thought I’d best round off the contest before making a start on those.

As for Nick, he did fantastically - as far as I’m aware he only dropped a couple of days - and wrote some brilliant entries. Great job, Nick! You were an excellent rival! I owe you a pint/ice-cream/ice-cream-in-a-pint!

List your five favourite artists, your five favourite songs by those artists and tag five other people to do it.

This was pretty tricky for me to answer as I generally seem to go in phases with music, and I’m not really ‘loyal’ to any particular artists. I also have a lot of single tracks from one artist in my collection (so, that artist only occurs once) which I love, but of course are no good for this meme. I used last.fm to determine my ‘top artists’:

1. The Offspring
2. OK Go
3. Pendulum
4. Belle and Sebastian
5. Jack Johnson

I wasn’t sure how accurate this would be, as I don’t always scrobble reliably (although, moreso recently) and I haven’t been actively using last.fm until fairly recently, despite being a member since 2005. However, I’d say The Offspring and OK Go should almost certainly be in my top 5, and the other 3 are all good too. Mika was just off the bottom of the list, here. Determining my top 5 songs for each artist was a little more tricky, but again last.fm came to the rescue!

The Offspring

1. Want You Bad
2. Why Don’t You Get a Job?
3. No Brakes
4. Have You Ever
5. All I Want

All great songs, and Want You Bad is almost certainly my favourite. All I Want is fantastic, too (and in Crazy Taxi!). In fact, I’m pretty certain it was Crazy Taxi that introduced me to The Offspring in the first place.

OK Go

1. Here It Goes Again
2. A Million Ways
3. A Good Idea at the Time
4. Don’t Ask Me
5. It’s a Disaster (+ Hello, My Treacherous Friends was on equal ranking)

OK Go are great, and their music has a pretty good range: some really energetic, some slower and gentler. Here It Goes Again deserves its place at the top - it’s my Power Song on my Nike+ running aid, and can just really perk me up when I’m flagging to complete that last quarter of a mile! Plus, fantastic video!

Pendulum

1. Blood Sugar
2. Slam
3. Distress Signal
4. Granite
5. Prelude (through the loop)

I was introduced to Pendulum… last year, perhaps? I can’t remember who by, but it was almost certainly one of Chris, Dave, or Steve. Some of their stuff is so damn catchy (if not a bit samey).

Belle and Sebastian

1. I’m a Cuckoo
2. Dear Catastrophe Waitress
3. Wrapped Up In Books
4. Expectations
5. Piazza, New York

Belle and Sebastian are great (especially the Dear Catastrophe Waitress album), and I discovered them through I’m a Cuckoo, which is most likely why it’s at the top. Expectations is perhaps my current favourite (and featured in the Juno soundtrack!).

Jack Johnson

1. Sitting, Waiting, Wishing
2. Constellations
3. Breakdown
4. Never Know
5. Do You Remember

Jack Johnson makes some good music, although I’m not sure I would’ve particularly considered him when thinking of a top 5 myself. That said, all of these songs are fantastic.

So, those are my 5/5 according to last.fm. I figured that whilst I was looking at some music-related stats, I’d post some other things that might be of interest:

My favourite album is almost certainly the Garden State soundtrack. I love every single track on there. It’s just awesome (although, perhaps best if you’ve seen the film).

As I mentioned earlier, I have a lot of individual tracks for many artists, rather than whole albums. I thought I’d take a look at my top 10 tracks overall, to see what’s in it:

1. Regina Spektor – Fidelity
2. Yael Naïm – New Soul
3. The Offspring – Want You Bad
4. Belle and Sebastian – I’m a Cuckoo
5. Jonathan Coulton – Code Monkey
6. Duke Special – Everybody wants a little something
7. Skins Cast & Cat Stevens – Wild World
8. José González – Heartbeats
9. Amy Adams – That’s How You Know
10. Pendulum – Blood Sugar

All of these tracks are fantastic (although, I haven’t listened to Heartbeats for ages), but note that this only includes two tracks from my ‘top five’ artists. Fidelity and New Soul are quite similar sounds to one another, I think, and they’re both fairly recent finds of mine so I find it fairly amazing that they’re already at the top of the list. Duke Special is another current favourite, that I discovered through The Cabel Yay! Awards. Oh, and That’s How You Know? Let’s just call it a guilty pleasure.

I tag Nick and Tom!

Step 1:

Firstly, readline needs updating, so grab readline 5.2 from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/. After extracting it (tar xvzf readline-5.2.tar.gz) you’ll need to make one or two changes so that it will build correctly on Leopard. Simply apply this patch to support/shobj-conf in the readline directory you’ve created. The patch is necessary because readline currently doesn’t check for Leopard, only for earlier versions of OS X. In fact, the patch is simple enough that you could change the two lines by hand if necessary.

Then, configure readline, specifying a location so you don’t interfere with what’s already on your system, then build and install it:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/
make
sudo make install

Step 2:

Next, you’ll want to download Ruby 1.9: http://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.9/. Again, we want to specify our own install location, and we also need to tell it where our newly installed readline is. We’re also specifying a program-suffix here (-trunk) so we can differentiate Ruby 1.9 from our pre-installed Ruby (so we’ll access 1.9 with ruby-trunk, irb-trunk, etc, and 1.8.6 with ruby, irb, etc).

tar xvzf ruby-1.9.0-1.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.9.0-1
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/ruby1.9 --program-suffix=-trunk --with-readline-dir=/usr/local --
make
sudo make install

Step 3:

Finally, because we’ve installed Ruby in a specific location, you’ll most likely need to add its location to your path. I have a bin/ directory in my home directory, so I simply have the following line in my .bash_profile:

# Add Ruby 1.9
PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/ruby1.9/bin

And you’re done. You can test by running ruby-trunk –version. Any problems, sound off in the comments. I may have missed something, as it’s rather late - and I could’ve almost certainly written this better. Hopefully I’ll revisit it in the future. If you get stuck, the articles I used to put this together might be of use:

• http://lindsaar.net/2008/1/18/installing-ruby-1-9-on-mac-osx
• http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/136498
• Also, thank you to Han Kessels for helping me via e-mail.
• And I’m sure there were some other sites, that I can’t recall at the moment.

A common coding/computer science task is to swap the values of two variables. In some languages, such as Java, one may start by creating a new temporary variable. For example (assuming we already have two ints, x and y):

int temp = x;
x = y;
y = temp;

This creation of a new variable uses more memory, and whilst in most circumstances would be fine, it could become an issue if we’re swapping many times, for example in a sorting algorithm.

Some languages allow us to do a nice swap without extra variables, using multiple assignment and tuple packing and unpacking:

x, y = y, x

This is pretty neat, although is apparently slower than using a temporary variable.

Anyway, yesterday I discovered a third method: XOR swapping. Again, this doesn’t require the use of an extra variable, and I thought it was pretty clever (here ^ represents XOR, as in Python):

x = x ^ y
y = x ^ y
x = x ^ y

Neat, huh? It’s fairly simple to see how it works if you simply walk through the steps. Let’s swap x = 7, y = 9:

x = 0111
y = 1001
x = x ^ y = 1110
y = x ^ y = 0111
x = x ^ y = 1001

Apparently this method is quite commonly used in embedded assembly code, however you won’t find it appearing much in code on a desktop computer. It usually is slower to compute than using temporary variables, as most processors attempt to execute commands in parallel - and of course, each of these instructions depends upon the previous result, so they must be executed sequentially. Still, it’s a nice thing to know.

The short version: it seems that if you’re trying to save memory then XOR swap or use multiple assignment, otherwise if efficiency is an issue, use a temporary variable.

Obviously, using a multitude of systems for variations on the same task isn’t ideal. I’m sure it’d be possible to use del.icio.us in such a way that you could cover all these uses with the right selection of tags, however again I’m not sure this is ideal, and it’s not the intended use of the system. If anyone knows of a bookmarking system that covers most/all of these uses, please let me know!

My current plan is to implement my own system to solve this problem, and I figure it’d be a good excuse to put Ruby on Rails into practice to make a proper website. Intended features include: storage of bookmarks for a range of uses - each with an associated ‘view’ (these uses will include reference, research, and pages currently being read), tagging of bookmarks, and adding bookmarks via bookmarklets. I’ll let you know how I get on.

Apologies for the lack of links in this post - I’m currently in the pub on my iPod Touch and I can’t be arsed. I’ll add them when I get home

My own first solution was Python-based, and a fairly simple one:

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for i in range(1,101):
    if i % 3 == 0 and i % 5 == 0:
        print "FizzBuzz"
    elif i % 3 == 0:
        print "Fizz"
    elif i % 5 == 0:
        print "Buzz"
    else:
        print i

Obviously it’s not in a function or anything, but I just wanted to do it as fast as possible. Shortly afterwards, I realised that line 2 could be simplified by changing it to:

2

	if i % 15 == 0:

Because of course, if a number is a multiple of 3 and 5, then it must be a multiple of 15.

Here are a couple of nice alternatives (ideas courtesy of Dave, although re-written by me because we didn’t save them). First, writing FizzBuzz as a iterator:

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def fizzbuzz_generator(n):
	for i in range(1, n+1):
		if i % 15 == 0:
			yield "FizzBuzz"
		elif i % 3 == 0:
			yield "Fizz"
		elif i % 5 == 0:
			yield "Buzz"
		else:
			yield str(i)
 
for result in fizzbuzz_generator(100): print result

Then, a simple function to calculate the correct fizz/buzz, combined with a list comprehension to create the result (man, I love list comprehensions):

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def fizzbuzz(i):
	if i % 15 == 0:
		return "FizzBuzz"
	elif i % 3 == 0:
		return "Fizz"
	elif i % 5 == 0:
		return "Buzz"
	else:
		return str(i)
 
print "\n".join([fizzbuzz(i) for i in range(1,101)])

Finally, here are two neat little Ruby one-liners, taken from the comments of the original FizzBuzz article. I hope the authors (Brendan, and Brian respectively) don’t mind me reproducing them here:

puts (1..100).map{|i|(s=(i%3==0?'Fizz':'')+(i%5==0?'Buzz':''))==''?i:s}
 
puts (1..100).map{|i|i%15==0?'FizzBuzz':i%5==0?'Buzz':i%3==0?'Fizz':i}

How neat is that? Anyway, as I said, feel free to leave your own solutions below.

I love to code. Since a young age (I think I was about 7 when we first got out BBC B, and I would patiently tap BASIC code into the blinking prompt from childrens’ books about programming), I’ve loved to write programs. I read somewhere recently (unfortunately, I forget where) that it’s not the act of coding itself we love, but rather it’s solving problems that we love. I think that’s one reason I like learning new programming languages, as it allows me to solve problems in different ways.

A while back, I came upon the FizzBuzz idea. In short, it’s a simple exercise for employers to give to potential employees at interviews; a very simple exercise, yet one that someone will only be able to answer quickly if they ‘get’ programming. A suggested FizzBuzz problem is the following:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.

I invite everyone reading this to have a go now - time yourself, and see how quickly you can do it. Unfortunately, I only timed myself by looking at the clock, but I was glad to have completed it in under a minute. Apparently this shows I can code:

Most good programmers should be able to write out on paper a program which does this in a under a couple of minutes. Want to know something scary ? - the majority of comp sci graduates can’t. I’ve also seen self-proclaimed senior programmers take more than 10-15 minutes to write a solution.

That is a scary thought, but I expect it’s almost certainly true.

So, this sort of simple problem excites me - I can work out a solution, and then try and improve that, perhaps. Myself and Dave spent a fair while earlier today trying to come up with more and more sophisticated solutions. And y’know what? It was fun!

On a similar note, I thought I’d mention a website that I found a while back (thanks to Matt Gwynne) that might be of interest to anybody else who enjoys these kind of problems. Project Euler is “a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve”. It contains a list of (at the time of writing) 195 mathematical problems, and the aim is to write code to solve them. You can then put in your answers, the website will tell you if you’re correct, and check them off the list. Great fun, and it’s neat to see some of the interesting solutions that people come up with (and the range of languages they use!). Hooray for being a geek! \o/