Comments(0) Holidays and a new job have been occupying my attention for the past couple of weeks but, fear not, I’m still pursuing my algorithms project. Next up on the agenda is Heap Sort.
Comments(2) Use Gnome Partition Editor (gpartd).
Fusion 2.x allows you to resize a disk but does not grow the underlying NTFS partition. Once you’ve resized the disk using the vmware gui, you need to grow the partition. You can get gpartd on a livecd; the application groks a wide variety of file systems including NTFS. Read more »
Comments(1) So the first comment that I received for the Merge Sort post pointed out that my implementation was not very efficient. While the code correctly implements the algorithm, practical choices (such as choice of data structure) make the code very inefficient – the code I show will definitely not execute in O(nlogn) time. I took another swing at the Lisp code, paying closer attention to performance issues.
Comments(3) Merge sort is another simple algorithm that introduces a fairly powerful concept: Divide and Conquer. Like the previous example, we’ll look at the algorithm, a Lisp implementation then look a bit at running time.
Comments(0) So the first algorithm that we’re going to work on is insertion sort. This is a very simple/intuitive routine, the easiest way to think about how it works is to consider how you might sort a handful of cards.
Comments(3) Like most Engineers I occasionally get inspired to pursue extra-curricular technical projects. Over the years, they’ve ranged from simply learning a new language/framework, to hacking around with circuits and micro-controllers to writing (sometimes) useful little applications. Most of the time, there’s nothing interesting to blog about. I think my current project is different and might be worth sharing. Read more »
Comments(0) 1) AVCHD - Bought a nifty new hard disk HD video camera to replace my circa 1996 clunker. Trying to work with the data that comes off the thing is crazy. I especially appreciate being punished for owning a Mac - all bundled stuff is PC. Only consolation is that the bundled stuff is apparently useless.
2) Mac - Wanted iMovie ‘08. Can’t just buy iMovie ‘08, must have a whole friggn’ “i” life apparently. Got the impression that Leopard made everything iHappy. Bit the iBullet and upgraded; still no iMovie ‘08. My fault for not reading the fine print (yes, I know Office doesn’t come with XP/Vista…) but, I’m going to be out near $200 to just read HD video files. Sheesh…
3) Chrome - I like it. It’s new. Tech has been boring recently. But… What the hell? Carpet bombing vuln? Not exactly a low-profile issue for WebKit. Also, the password store is accessible by merely pushing the “show saved passwords” button. I mean ‘cmon, you got “clandestine” mode for hiding pron sessions and you can’t hide my passwords from someone who steals my laptop?
grumpy…
Comments(0) A really interesting demonstration of editing/manipulation video footage using higher quality stills to guide correction algorithms. Very impressive stuff!
Comments(0) Nice visualization of the financial markets.
Comments(1) This is a fun find.
I happened across a tool, Trulia Hindsight, that animates population (housing) growth over time on top of satellite imagry. The tool is a “side-show gimmick” for a real estate search site but, it’s pretty cool anyway.
It’s interesting to see some of the population trends that you’ve always heard about. For example, I’ve always heard that my town was mainly farmland until the 50’s; my neighborhood was a late 50’s development and; that the little lake near my house was a 20’s tourist (camp) destination. You can actually see those facts with Trulia. You can zoom in and out and the data gets finer/coarser corresponding to zoom level. Zoomed out, you can see broader trends like the city growth around the turn of the century, growth around rail lines and, the more “spattered” growth that having a car that can take you anywhere created.
I’m not sure how clean the data are. You see some pretty big bumps, for instance, at 1900. Is that just a book keeping artifact and lots of pre-1900 stuff gets “recognized” for the first time in that year or is the data real and the bump shows the impact of absorbing lots of immigrants? Regardless, it’s a fun data visualization.