After a few intermediate to advanced Exercises, I decided to try something that’s a little easier this month. Still, even if you’re a pro, it helps to pull back and try something basic just to see what you can do with it.
Continue reading
I enjoy reading about and studying mathematics. One of my favorite books is A History of π. I’ve used this book to inspire my Pi Day (March 14) programs. It’s fascinating stuff.
Continue reading
This month’s Exercise may seem like a repeat of the Exercise “We Have a Winnah!” from July of 2013. It’s not.
Continue reading
Like many innocent and silly math games, No Nines is nerdy to play but fun to code. The game works like this:
Continue reading
One of the many, useful tools a programmer must have is a hexdump utility. The utility consumes a file’s raw bytes and outputs them in a human-readable manner. By examining the dump, you can determine if file contains the proper data in the correct format, as well as do other interesting, useful, and technerd things.
Continue reading
Last month, I published a post of the classic programming chestnut, a number-guessing game. In the post, I wrote: “Variable tries is set equal to 6 because I read somewhere that it’s possible to guess a value between 1 and 100 in six or fewer tries (though I’m probably incorrect).” And, yes, I was wrong.
Continue reading
Recently, I wrote a utility that required the final line of text in a file to terminate with a special code. The code had to sit at the end of a line of text, not on a blank line. What I discovered is that many text files end with one or more blank lines.
Continue reading
I’m certain that the nerds would love debating whether the telegraph’s Morse code system was the first binary communications network. Let them do so. Still, Morse code remains a simple communications system, translating letters and numbers into dots and dashes — which you could argue are similar to ones and zeros.
Continue reading
When a computer program wants to know a Yes or No answer, the function I write is called yorn().
Continue reading
This semester has been brutal! You’ve had five classes, three of which are required for your major and two electives that turned out to be tougher than you anticipated. Yet, you pulled through the term without dropping a single course. You now have your grades and want to know your GPA for the semester.
Continue reading