GoWind

#The normal way to find the digits in a number is to divide it by 10 until it becomes zero and return the count of times this is done
# There is however an easier solution. for any number n, we can find the log of n to the base 10. this will return a decimal value if n #is not a power of 10 or an integer if n = 10 ** k for some k. So the solution to find the number of digits in a number is to find the 
# largest power of 10  greater than or equal to n
import math

def digits(n):
    n = abs(n)
    return int(math.ceil(math.log(n, 10)))

GoWind

The edit distance is the minimum number of changes need to transform one sentence into another. For example the edit distance between 'cat' and 'cats' is 1 and between 'rat' and 'hammer' is 6 (change 'r' to 'h', retain the 'a' and then replace 't' with 'mmer'). 

Calculating the edit distance between 2 words is done by using a dynamic programming approach. 
Consider transforming sentence 'arts' to 'artu'.
There are three possible ways to do this 
adding a 'u' after 'art' in 'arts'.
deleting the 'u' in 'artu' to get 'art' in 'arts'.
substituting  's' with 'u' 
assuming the cost to delete, add or substitute is 1, this can be expressed as 

GoWind

#    Huffman Encoding is an encoding scheme to compress the size of data .
#    http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/Multimedia/node210.html
#
#   I designed a simple Huffman Prefix tree maker and a Huffman encoder to encode text strings
import sys
from collections import defaultdict

class HufNode:
	def __init__(self,char,value):
		self.char = char

GoWind

 d = {}

def coinchange(change , Coinlist):
	""" input
			change - the amount that is to be changed into coins
			Coinlist - list of coins sorted in descending order
		output 
			list of possible combinations for given change
	"""
	

GoWind

%Bubblesort is pretty non-intuitive in Erlang with its lists and recursive style of programming . Overnight I wrote a bubblesort function in erlang based on the example provided here http://tinyurl.com/bng9ku2 ( link to a pdf with exercises in erlang)

%The code is given as below

 %the func prototype exposed 
 bubblesort(Alist,N) -> bubblesort([],Alist,0,N).
 %all items are sorted
bubblesort(Curlist,Alist,X,N) when X == N -> Alist;
%only largest item is in the temp list. In that case move it to the
%mainlist and proceed with the next item 

GoWind

Markdown is a simple language to write create web pages . Markdown is much easier than HTML with the barest of markup ( as opposed to HTML) and lets you focus on the content . 
The best way to create your own static website is to create a user.github.io page ( its pretty simple ) and then write your pages in markdown ( *.md files) and let some program generate HTML for you . 
Unfortunately , while people on the internet obsess over Markdown , I found it hard to find a simple and easy-to-use tool to generate my static website . The most often cited tool Jekyll and Hugo were overkill for my needs ( and Hugo didn't  work in my case for I was unable to generate any html files  ) 
Anyway, back to the topic , i found a nice tool called markdown2 a python based html generator  .Its easy to install with

   sudo pip install markdown2
   (or)
   sudo easy_install markdown2

you will need python (2.7 in my case) and python pip or python setup_tools

GoWind

import sys

solutions = []

def place(positions,col):
	if positions is None:
		return True
	current_row = len(positions)
	if col in  positions:
		return False