Today I learned about a state machine compiler and code generator. It provides a small DSL that you can use to describe a state machine and the transitions between the states, which will be compiled to create a number of classes, and then all you have to do is provide the code for the actions. Here, actions, states, and transitions are defined terms that are described in the documentation for the smc tool.
The Recursive Maze Problem
Earlier this year, when I was looking for work, I got the same recursive maze problem three interviews in a row. Recursion is cute and clever, but you generally want to use iterative solutions in production.
Getting CSRF to work with Rails and Angular
I had trouble posting to my Rails server from an Angular controller until I found this SO post. In /app/controllers/application_controller.rb I added the following code.
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
protect_from_forgery with: :exception
after_action :set_csrf_cookie_for_ng
def set_csrf_cookie_for_ng
cookies['XSRF-TOKEN'] = form_authenticity_token if protect_against_forgery?
end
protected
# In Rails 4.2 and above
def verified_request?
super || valid_authenticity_token?(session, request.headers['X-XSRF-TOKEN'])
end
end
Getting Started with Watercolor
In this post, I’ll discuss options for building a watercolor kit, and provide some introductory reading material.
My Background
I started working in watercolor in 2016. I heard the quote by Annie Dillard, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.” and thought that I should make an effort to carve out more time for art, before I don’t have any time left to carve. I decided to work more in watercolor because, for me, it strikes a balance between range of expression, time, and space. Also, although I’ve done art my whole life, I’ve tended to shy away from color because of it’s difficulty. Focusing on watercolor has allowed/forced me to learn more about color.
Functional Digression at Work
One of my coworkers asked how to filter a list, but return the “pass” and “fail” items in separate lists. For example, filter takes some data and a condition, and returns a list of the items that pass the condition, but what if we returned two lists? One of my other coworkers came up with a neat solution using reduce, and I wrote something using generics. Here’s the operation I’m calling “fork”, implemented in Swift3.
import Foundation
func fork<T>(_ data: [T], completion: (T)->Bool) -> ([T],[T]) {
var pass = [T]()
var fail = [T]()
for item in data {
completion(item) ? pass.append(item) : fail.append(item)
}
return (pass,fail)
}
var (pass, fail) = fork([0,1,2,3,4]) { $0 % 2 == 0 }
Deterministic Finite Automata in Swift
I’ve been reading Understanding Computation by Tom Suart, and it reminds me of my first CS class in grad school where I learned about and struggled to implement finite automata. I think one major lesson from that experience was to forget about the pictures of circles and loops on the blackboard, and figure out the bare minimum needed to represent the idea. In the case of finite automata, the bare minimum was that there was a state, and a set of rules that modified the state; each rule was composed of a current state, an input, and a next state. I decided to implement a simple finite automata in Swift using a list of Ints as states, and a single Int as input.
Very Very Verbose Cosine Similarity
This material was a teaching aid for a crash course I gave at work about cosine similarity. Cosine similarity is a blunt instrument used to compare two sets of text. If two the two texts have high numbers of common words, then the texts are assumed to be similar. The ultimate goal is to plug two texts into a function and get an easy to understand number out that describes how similar the texts are, and cosine similarity is one way to skin that cat.
Please note, there are plenty of other very fast implementations for cosine similarity, but this one was written for educational purposes.
C++14 Range Based For Loops
C++ has changed a lot since I was first learned about it in college, so I’m going to do a series of posts outlining some of those changes as they come up for me. First off: range-based for-loops using auto type-inference. Here’s the TL;DR:
- Use
auto iwhen you want to work with copies of the array items - Use
auto &iwhen you want to work with the original items and maybe modify them place - Use
auto const &iwhen you want to work with the original items and not modify them
How Many Trials Before the Nth Success
TLDR: the negative binomial counts the number of trials needed before the Nth success.
I had this problem where we were considering running some very expensive tests that had a known success rate, and we wanted to know, given the success rate and the cost, whether we should run them at all. To make things more interesting, we were only interested in a set number 
of successes, and we could stop all testing after the first successes. My initial thought was to use the binomial distribution, but the binomial doesn’t “cut off” after a set number of successes. It turns out that we needed to use a version of the negative binomial distribution.
Setting Up Sphinx Documentation
It took me a while to get Sphinx documentation set up correctly. Since it is highly configurable, it is highly easy to not configure correctly. In this guide I’ll assume that you’re using a Python virtual environment, and that you’ve placed the source code that you want to document in a directory called src/. I’ll walk through installing and configuring what you need to create documentation from inline comments using the Google or NumPy style, and create API documentation for a Flask server. I’ll be extra-explicit about what directory I’m in when I make calls that make assumptions about the working directory.