Instagram Engineering Challenge.

In the summer of 2011, I decided to take on the Instagram Engineering Challenge.  As with all of my projects, I refuse to search around for anything other than syntax.

This challenge asks for a simple script solution to take a "shredded" image and put it back together.

I, however, decided to create a small Java application to do this, mainly because most of my coursework at the time was in Java and I wanted to build onto my Java skill set.

When I started this, I didn't know how much I would have to learn, but I quickly found out there is more than a few concepts rolled into this one challenge.

Chromebook Pixel - Crouton Fish Shell Beta

Crouton Fish Shell Beta.


Installation was actually really easy.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zanchey/fishfish-snapshot

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install fishfish

#now set this shell as default.

chsh -s /usr/bin/fish

You're up and running!  Easy as 1-2-3.

Google Chromebook Pixel - Crouton, Linux, Skype and all the little things.

I've had the Chromebook Pixel for about a month now.

The base model.

I'm going to assume that you already know what the Pixel is about, but in case you don't, you can check it out at http://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/devices/chromebook-pixel/ .

Web Applications

Here's where we start running into problems.  Skype does not work at all with the pixel in Chrome OS.  I've tried imo, which is good for simple messaging using your skype account, but that's where it ends.  Actually it does offer video, but what it does it throw a link to a web chatroom down on the other end and you and the other person just chat in a flash video room.

Here comes crouton to the rescue, again!  I you're just an apt-get or dpkg away from skype for linux.  Which works great except for the small font size and possible audio issues.  You can fix the audio problems by switching everything to pulse audio in settings.  The small font size, however can only be fixed if you scale the entire desktop with something like qrandr.

The same goes for any other gtk type web application.

The Web experience.

DES Java Implementation

DES JAVA implementation.


Well I did it.  2 days and over 500 lines of code, (346 made it into the final project).


For this assignment, we were given a skeleton code and told to not alter any of the method parameters.  I'm always wary about taking skeleton code and trying to make it work.  The reason is that I often find places where I would adjust the code to suit my coding habits and patterns.

This time, however, the problem came with the massive raw amount of methods and information held in the code.  Certainly not a simple project of filling in some for loops.

I really liked the structure of this assignment.  Having each method being checked against the output and building the code in a modular style made it obvious on how to get everything working.  This, however, worked against me when I first started coding the project.  I just sat down and coded everything with the idea of bug squashing at the end.  A mistake to say the least!  200+ errors gave me something to chew on.

So, after running through all the logic errors and compilation errors, I finally got this working, a good 25+ hours of time -well spent.

 Here's the output, success!

ProjectEuler 6-10 Problems and Solutions

It's January 7th, 2013 and I spent this unseasonably warm afternoon doing some Project Euler Problems.

I just wanted to quickly do these and make sure they were logically correct.  Which means they won't be in the most optimized format.

ProjectEuler 1-5 Problems and Solutions

Last summer someone told me about Project Euler.  It's essentially a bunch of open programming exercises that usually involve some reasonable knowledge of mathematics and data structures.  I'm only going to be this specific for the first 5 questions, otherwise this would turn into a book.

The interesting part is that it lists how many people have successfully completed the problem essentially rating each problem's crowd based difficulty level.

So I started doing these my sophomore year in college, and found out quickly that I was slightly under prepared to solve them in any way but the most basic and least efficient way.

I use mainly Python and Java, however as the problems took longer for the computer to solve, I shift to C.