svagionitis

/*
This brute force algorithm was originally written (by me) back in 1998, and has been collecting dust 
since then. However, for the purpose of testing Gist on GitHub I decided to rewrite the algorithm 
from VB6 to C#, make some improvements and release this fast, compact, non-recursive, brute force 
algorithm under the MIT license: http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

Notes:
- Do a run with testLetters = "0123456789" and testLength = 3, to see what happens
- Remember to keep the callback testCalback as fast as possible
- Tweet some love to @fredrikdev :)

svagionitis

How to set up stress-free SSL on an OS X development machine

One of the best ways to reduce complexity (read: stress) in web development is to minimize the differences between your development and production environments. After being frustrated by attempts to unify the approach to SSL on my local machine and in production, I searched for a workflow that would make the protocol invisible to me between all environments.

Most workflows make the following compromises:

• Use HTTPS in production but HTTP locally. This is annoying because it makes the environments inconsistent, and the protocol choices leak up into the stack. For example, your web application needs to understand the underlying protocol when using the secure flag for cookies. If you don't get this right, your HTTP development server won't be able to read the cookies it writes, or worse, your HTTPS production server could pass sensitive cookies over an insecure connection.

• Use production SSL certificates locally. This is annoying

svagionitis

Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python

Notes from Raymond Hettinger's talk at pycon US 2013 video, slides.

The code examples and direct quotes are all from Raymond's talk. I've reproduced them here for my own edification and the hopes that others will find them as handy as I have!

Looping over a range of numbers

for i in [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5]:

svagionitis

greek_alphabet = {
    u'\u0391': 'Alpha',
    u'\u0392': 'Beta',
    u'\u0393': 'Gamma',
    u'\u0394': 'Delta',
    u'\u0395': 'Epsilon',
    u'\u0396': 'Zeta',
    u'\u0397': 'Eta',
    u'\u0398': 'Theta',
    u'\u0399': 'Iota',

svagionitis

#!/bin/bash
function jsonval {
    temp=`echo $json | sed 's/\\\\\//\//g' | sed 's/[{}]//g' | awk -v k="text" '{n=split($0,a,","); for (i=1; i<=n; i++) print a[i]}' | sed 's/\"\:\"/\|/g' | sed 's/[\,]/ /g' | sed 's/\"//g' | grep -w $prop`
    echo ${temp##*|}
}

json=`curl -s -X GET http://twitter.com/users/show/$1.json`
prop='profile_image_url'
picurl=`jsonval`

svagionitis

M[16],X=16,W,k;main(){T(system("stty cbreak")
);puts(W&1?"WIN":"LOSE");}K[]={2,3,1};s(f,d,i
,j,l,P){for(i=4;i--;)for(j=k=l=0;k<4;)j<4?P=M
[w(d,i,j++)],W|=P>>11,l*P&&(f?M[w(d,i,k)]=l<<
(l==P):0,k++),l=l?P?l-P?P:0:l:P:(f?M[w(d,i,k)
]=l:0,++k,W|=2*!l,l=0);}w(d,i,j){return d?w(d
-1,j,3-i):4*i+j;}T(i){for(i=X+rand()%X;M[i%X]
*i;i--);i?M[i%X]=2<<rand()%2:0;for(W=i=0;i<4;
)s(0,i++);for(i=X,puts("\e[2J\e[H");i--;i%4||
puts(""))printf(M[i]?"%4d|":"    |",M[i]);W-2

svagionitis

#
# Copyright (C) 2010-2012 Vinay Sajip. All rights reserved. Licensed under the new BSD license.
#
import ctypes
import logging
import os

class ColorizingStreamHandler(logging.StreamHandler):
    # color names to indices
    color_map = {

svagionitis

spion@missperfect:~/Projects/testhash$ gcc -O3 test.c -o testc
spion@missperfect:~/Projects/testhash$ time ./testc
The 1000000
a 2000000
at 1000000
brown 1000000
dog 1000000
era 1000000
fox 1000000
jumped 1000000

svagionitis

The Challenge
-------------
Given the following riddle, write a regular expression describing all possible answers,
assuming you never make a move which simply undoes the last one you made.

The Riddle
----------
You are on your way somewhere, taking with you your cabbage, goat, and wolf, as always.
You come upon a river and are compelled to cross it, but you can only carry one of the
three animals at a time. None of whom can swim because this isn't THAT kind of riddle.

svagionitis

A lot of these are outright stolen from Edward O'Campo-Gooding's list of questions. I really like his list.

I'm having some trouble paring this down to a manageable list of questions -- I realistically want to know all of these things before starting to work at a company, but it's a lot to ask all at once. My current game plan is to pick 6 before an interview and ask those.

I'd love comments and suggestions about any of these.

I've found questions like "do you have smart people? Can I learn a lot at your company?" to be basically totally useless -- everybody will say "yeah, definitely!" and it's hard to learn anything from them. So I'm trying to make all of these questions pretty concrete -- if a team doesn't have an issue tracker, they don't have an issue tracker.

I'm also mostly not asking about principles, but the way things are -- not "do you think code review is important?", but "Does all code get reviewed?".