Puzzle: The Wolf, the Goat, and the Cabbage

In this post I’ll present a solution to a puzzle using Python. I think the primary value of this post is that it provides an example of how to translate an objective and a set of constraints into data structures and functions that can be interpreted by a computer. This problem breaks down into two interrelated parts:

  1. Translate the problem into data structures and functions
  2. Choose a strategy for finding the solution

Continue reading Puzzle: The Wolf, the Goat, and the Cabbage

Remove a Partition on a USB Drive in Windows

If you create a bootable USB flash drive for installing linux on a machines, you may have trouble reformatting it later in Windows. It is possible to create a bootable USB in such a way that the Windows reformatting utility, obtained by right-clicking on the drive and selecting Format…, does not see the partition containing the bootloader. In such a situation, you may have a 8GB drive, but the reformatting utility only sees 6GB, and reformatting will not recover the original 8GB of space.

Continue reading Remove a Partition on a USB Drive in Windows

Using THREE.js to Visualize 3D Point Sets

In this post I’ll describe a bare bones application for inputting and displaying three dimensional data in browser. The data is input using HTML, where it is parsed with JavaScript, and then plotted using the THREE.js library. The input data is parsed using whitespace, so colleagues can copy-paste data from Excel into the fields for plotting.

Continue reading Using THREE.js to Visualize 3D Point Sets