I have been searching for years for a decent programming font (that is, monospaced). Over the years, I’ve found various ones that suited me, but recently I found ranks as my favorite: Droid Sans Mono, Dotted.

I recently wrote a C version of a bunch of comparison-based sorting algorithms, notably timsort and quicksort.

I’m a sucker for programming contests, and have been since high school.

I thought I would post here about one ongoing contest and one upcoming one.

One of my favorite passions from my teenage days was assembly language programming. Don’t laugh.

It embodies a lot of my favorite things about programming: I have total control, it is clean and simple, and it is just and fast and functional as I am capable of making it. The only thing standing in the way of me and world domination is how well I can program.

Often, I like to read articles on particularly insightful programming techniques or algorithms. Sometimes these algorithms are for some fairly mundane things, like searching and sorting. (So mundane, of course, that Knuth wrote a whole book about it.)

I recently read an interesting article (actually, the slides linked to) about the horror that is the Global Interpreter Lock in Python, especially with multicore CPUs. And I agree — in these cases, the GIL is painful.

I’ve been doing a lot of programming lately, and in a multitude of different languages. For the most part, these are pretty “decent” languages: C, Python, Ruby, etc. However, none of the languages really makes me happy.

One of my new favorite hobbies / time sinks is Project Euler. Simply stated: a few hundred programming problems that are somewhat math-related. They are sort of like brain teasers for programming nerds.

As a follow-up to my previous post, I have found two ways of finding the distance between two cities in the US. One is slow and more correct, one is less slow and less correct.

There are lots of things I dislike about Python 3.0. I dislike the removal of the

print

map

Python 2.6 was recently released, with 3.0 coming out soon. Python 2.6 is meant to be sort of a stepping stone between the trusty old 2.x series and the hot, scary 3.0 series. So, naturally, I downloaded 2.6 to play with.

It’s been quiet here lately. I’ve had a lot of projects going on that occupy most of my time in the evenings and on weekends.