What's Up World

Today was a terribly lazy day, but I moved on a bit to merge sort. So far, I learned about Selection Sort, Insertion Sort, and Merge Sort. 

Selection sort is a very basic algorithm for sorting: the way selection sort works is that you would go through the entire array to put it into the first slot. Then, you would find the next smallest number and the put it into the second slot. You repeat finding the next smallest card each time and swapping it into the correct position until the array is sorted. 

Insertion sort works a bit differently: Essentially, you would start by comparing the second card (in the 1 index) with the first card (in the 0 index). If the second card is smaller, you switch places. You then proceed to go to the next card and compare it with all the cards previous to it and then insert it into the right index. You continue taking the card at the end of the sorted array and then comparing it to the cards before it until the whole array is sorted. 

How to "glean profound insight into most of what has driven the history of the western world." In December of 2011, Neil deGrasse Tyson -

Openings specifying a preference for "new" and "recent" college graduates may deter older applicants and run afoul of federal law.

Whassupp. Goodness I'm tired and I don't even know why. Today I didn't do particularly much: on KhanAcademy I continued with some more of the Algorithms course by going over asymptotic notation (big-theta, big-O, big-Omega) as well as selection sort. The last part of the selection sort section has a project part.

Essentially, you have to write up a selection sort program which takes in an array and returns a sorted array. Selection sort was divided initially into three functions to do the following: swap, finding the index where the minimum is in a subarray, and eventually decreasing the subarray each time until you reach the end of the array. Selection sort runs in big-theta(n^2) time.

For these projects you have to use javascript, which I don't really know but it's pretty similar to java so it's been alright so far. However, I have to write a function which displays the steps of the array and involves drawing arrows/lines which I don't really know how to do yet.

I figured out how to rerun my helloworld program on Java again; I realized that I changed the build file a bit and forgot to include a line of code which would allow the local time to be displayed. I ended up having to rebuild my program (even though my mother says that I supposedly don't have to do this if I don't change anything) and rerun it. Going back and understanding how my project worked (or at least trying to understand it) helped a lot in making me feel more confident on what I've done.

I’m getting worried. I’m excited that there are so many campaigns to try to increasing coding literacy, as I think there…

Haven't updated in a few days; I've been lounging around, relaxing in a way that I won't be able to indulge in once school starts up again. But since my last post, I've been kind of just going around everywhere (which isn't the greatest way to learn, I know). However, I decided I wanted to see some easy results so I did the HTML/CSS course for creating a website on codeacademy and tinkered around a bit with the javascript/jquery stuff as well. I also wanted to study algorithms up, so I started looking at the UNSW course on Data Structures and Algorithms, but then I found the KhanAcademy course so I'm hoping to just go through the whole subject for a very brief overview before diving back into the actual college courses. I've gone through the intro as well as the binary search section. Most annoying part was when I actually wrote a working program for a binary search but khanacademy is being picky. Whatever, it works, and the comments help once I realized that other people are also dealing with the same issue.  

This week, I'm hoping to accomplish the following: 

finish up the KhanAcademy lectures on Algorithms

rerun the Hello Java World program I built on gradle but cannot seem to rebuild/rerun (*insert fucking sad and frustrated face*)

start on the online file uploading java/gradle/spring project tutorial that stores uploaded file content in memory onto the server

potentially get to the tutorial on "Using Websockets to build an interactive Web application"

Working with Gradle again today. I'm using eclipse, and one issue I ran into was trying to import an external library; eclipse unfortunately couldn't recognize such a library.You go to the repository of the package,to its properties, to the java build file and added an external jar that I downloaded by following the URL (I found the joda time URL from the command prompt off of windows). After that, the red squigglies went away which makes me feel significantly better (all those red x's were stressing me out). 

Another thing to remember for me at least (b/c I'm probably the only one who pays attention to my rambling) is that you make sure your file is in the right folder. I had multiple files with the same names in different places which screwed me up a bit. 

Had large amounts of issues with having gradle go to the right path. But after about 2 hrs of work (on a 15 minute tutorial ARGH) I have finally finished!! The tutorial itself isn't difficult, but not being directed to the right places can fuck you up a lot. 

If anyone would like to try working with building java projects on gradle as well they can go to the tutorial here: http://spring.io/guides/gs/gradle/