Apr 21, 2011 · 4 minute read
$$ \Phi = \sum_{e \notin C} n^{2w_e}+n\exp\left(\frac{1}{2a}\left(\sum_{s \notin C} c_s - \sum_S 3x_s c_s \log(n)\right)\right) $$
This was the equation my professor put on the board. Magically. If you’ve seen algorithmic analysis before, you may recognize the form as a potential function. Effectively, this is a very convenient and powerful way to perform an amortized analysis on an otherwise difficult-to-analyze algorithm. Said another way, it’s a way by which we can keep track of money coming in and going out of a metaphorical bank.
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Mar 12, 2011 · 5 minute read
Today marks the beginning of Spring Break for us and the midway point of the semester as well. This is most definitely the hardest semester I’ve ever had so far and although it’s very stressful at times, I’m really enjoying it a lot. I guess in some ways this semester was a way for me to determine how much I actually loved computer science at the its core - to see how much I enjoyed it if I fully immersed myself in it.
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Jan 27, 2011 · 10 minute read
Another day, another unimaginative title. Anyway, yesterday, I received my brand-new CR-48 Chrome OS netbook for free my Google. First off, thanks Google! You guys totally freaking rock and you made me day and week.
The following is a sort of review and impressions of what I have experienced so far in about 24 hours with the device. I’ve made some customizations to the software which I will describe below.
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Jan 12, 2011 · 5 minute read
So. I have a final later today and I’m too bored of studying so I decided to write up a post on the latest Facebook Hacker Cup competition problems. As you may know, this past weekend, Facebook had the Qualification Round of their Hacker Cup. Basically, it’s a programming contest very similar to that of Google Code Jam that I mentioned a while back and follows a pretty regular format.
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Jan 6, 2011 · 3 minute read
It’s days like this that I wish so damn much that I could go to events such as CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2011, going on right now. One day, I swear I’ll go. Really.
I was just reading my usual roundup of tech blogs for the day and couldn’t help but realize that I got just about 217 items just in the past 24 hours regarding CES and all the ridiculously cool new technology they’re featuring there.
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Dec 11, 2010 · 6 minute read
This is solution to the previous blog post.
So there’s a couple things going on here. They include trigraphs, strange pointer arithmetic, casting, single and multi-line comments, and general compiler abuse. Let’s take this apart step by step:
Trigraphs Trigraphs were used several decades ago when keyboards then didn’t have all of the characters that we now have, such as curly braces, backslashes, etc. So, in order to encode these, three-character strings were used.
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Dec 6, 2010 · 1 minute read
Consider the following program written in pure C89 on a 32-bit OS:
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Nov 19, 2010 · 1 minute read
Wow, crazy. PUMaC is set to begin in under 24 hours! As I’ve mentioned before, PUMaC is Princeton University’s annual mathematics competition intended for high-schoolers (and brilliant middle-schoolers) around the country and world. It’s been an exciting journey thus far and I’ve had a great time working with the director and other core PUMaC staff to bring it all together. I haven’t seen the problems yet, but I’ve taken a peek at the Power Round test (already handed out to teams last Saturday) and it looks pretty interesting!
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Sep 2, 2010 · 3 minute read
Just watched the Apple event today. Quick thoughts:
Shuffle - good update, bringing back the physical controls on the device itself. Nano - WHAT?! Doesn’t look very intuitive at all! Screen’s smaller and doesn’t play video I hear? Seems like a downgrade to me. Also, the lack of accelerometer make rotating the display extremely annoying when you’re on the go. They should’ve instead made it more like the Zune HD and preserved the nice screen they had on the previous generation.
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Sep 2, 2010 · 7 minute read
It’s been a few weeks since I last updated this with a real post, so here it is.
I finished my research for the summer a few weeks back. I’m probably going to continue it again once the school year starts, but I decided I wanted at least some time to work on different things during the summer as well as catch a break. At the time that I ended, most of the major tasks assigned to me had been completed.
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