Miloping

During one interview I was asked to write an algorithm to reverse a singly-linked list. This is a data structure that can only be traversed in one direction, kind of like driving down a one-way street.

It is important to know how a linked list differs from an array. An array can also be used as a list, so when are linked lists more appropriate?

Python has become somewhat of a hobby of mine during the weekends. So I was very excited to hear about pyday. I took this opportunity to participate and eventually submitted “G Underground”. “G” is a character I made up in university when I was playing around with c and the curses library. Since I only had ascii to work with, I chose a letter to represent the hero of the quest, the letter “G”, battling it out against letter “T”s (Trolls) in a alphanumeric landscape.

Fast forward a few years and I have not done that much game programming, except the occasional pyweek . I have been working as a professional programmer and these challenges always provide me with many opportunities to learn new things.

Since it was an individual competition I got to choose an different aspect of game programming.

So here is a description of something I did a couple of weekends ago at Uni for my thesis. Hopefully you'll get some idea what I spent 3 years doing.

What I needed to do was a statistical significance test, that is, comparing two models to see if their results were actually any different. This guy, Dan Bikel, had written a script to do this, here: Randomized Parsing Evaluation Comparator. Only problem was it was in Perl, which as we all know, sucks hard, and also blows. So I rewrote the thing in Python, yay Python!

Here's what it does. You take two input files that look like this:
Sent. Matched Bracket Cross Correct Tag
ID Len. Stat. Recal Prec.

Just as a bit of an introduction, this article refers to the wedding website I am making to manage the guests that are coming to my wedding. So far, the website has guests, it has locations (places where events for the wedding will occur) and it has pages to manage these entities. Also, by the power of Django, guests can already login and see a blank page. You may be wondering why anyone would want to login to view a blank page, and my answer is they wouldn't want to. So today I started researching how best to display the invitations. For the invitations I have a few requirements, they should have an image background, then there is a certain amount of static text in a certain font, and the name of the guest in a separate font. The names have to be added later and preferably by a script as I do not want to sit around for several hours and insert names into the invitations, file by file.

I am getting married. It does not come as a shock to anyone who knows me as it has been quite a while coming. However, not content to send out normal invitations I have decided to make a wedding website to host invitations, send out e-mail notifications and track RSVPs.

I would like to share the journey of its development, until it is ready.