Month: November 2005

Switching to Lighttpd

Recently a lot of people seem to be switching from Apache to Lighttpd, which is a webserver that is said to be a lot faster, but even better it is said to have a constant low memory footprint.

I`m currently compiling lighttpd on my vserver (on which this blog runs), and I`ll switch to lighttpd – which should be as easy as setting some configurations for lighttpd to fit in with the current /var/www model I`m using and simply switching off Apache and switching on lighttpd.

I hope there won’t be a lot downtime.

Update Lighttpd and fastcgi don’t seem to really go together on my server configuration, so no lighttpd for a while :(.

Westerbaan Huurman notation

[Cn-H]1..8
[sigma(n,n+1)]1..3,5..7;
sigma(4,1);sigma(8,5);
[sigma(n,n+4)]1..4

and

C1-5,H-C2-6,H-C3-7,H-C4-8,H,1;
C5-H-C6-H-C7-C8-H;

and

[Cn-n+4,H]1..4;
[Cn-H]5..8;
sigma(4,1); sigma(8,5);

They all represent the same carbon cube. (C8H8)

Purpose; because the normal naming of chemistry can’t define all structures they come up with trivial names, which I find very annoying. This notation is intended to be able to describe every structure uniformly. And no, don’t even try to pronounce it.

Code Golf 3: Googler

Code Golf. As with the real sport the goal is to reduce the number of strokes that it takes to complete a particular objective, although with Code Golf “strokes” refers to keystrokes rather than swings of a golf club.

Write code to return the url’s of the first page of search results for the query ‘perl’ on google.com

There’ll be two categories, one for using perl’s Socket module only, and for those using external libraries.

Good luck!

Code Golf 2: Line Sort

Code Golf. As with the real sport the goal is to reduce the number of strokes that it takes to complete a particular objective, although with Code Golf “strokes” refers to keystrokes rather than swings of a golf club.

Create an algorithm that reads lines from the stdin until it hits an EOF and prints those lines sorted to the stdout

  • Don’t use the language’s native sorting capabilities, write your own sorting algorithm. (print for sort<> would be too easy.)
  • Any language is allowed, except for those that myseriously implement a 1 byte command that does exactly this.

Example implementation using inverted bubble sort:

@a = <>;
for ($i = 0; $i <= $#a; $i++) {
 for ($j = $i; $j <= $#a; $j++) {
  if (@a[$i] ge @a[$j]) {
   $t = @a[$j];
   @a[$j] = @a[$i];
   @a[$i] = $t;
  }
 }
}
foreach(@a) {
 print;
}

This implementation is very large and inefficient, and just an example.

Good luck!

Code Golf 1: Fibonacci

Code Golf. As with the real sport the goal is to reduce the number of strokes that it takes to complete a particular objective, although with Code Golf “strokes” refers to keystrokes rather than swings of a golf club.

You may compete using any language.1

Create an algorithm that prints the 30 first fibonacci number to the screen, each followed by a newline.

An algorithm which could do this would be (148 bytes):

my $a = 1;
my $b = 0;
my $c;

my $limit = 30;
my $i = 0;

while ($i < $limit) {
        $i += 1;
        $c = $a + $b;
        $a = $b;
        $b = $c;
        print $c . "\n";
}

But that can be written way shorter.

My first:

$a=1;for((0..29)){$c=$a+$b;$a=$b;$b=$c;print"$c\n"}

My second:
$a=1;$c=$a+$b,$a=$b,$b=$c,print"$c\n"for 0..29

Noud’s reponse:
$i=1;print$i+=$a,"\n",$a+=$i,"\n"while$i<317811

My revenge:
$a=1;$c=$a+$b,$a=$b,$b=$c,print"$c\n"for 0..29

Noud was 30 seconds later with:
$a=1;print$a+=$b,"\n",$b+=$a,"\n"for 1..15

My latest one: partially by Bram too
print$a+=$b,"\n",$b+=$a,"\n"for$a++..14

Update:Twan:
print$a+=$b,$/,$b+=$a,$/for$a++..14

1. a language that implements fib returning mysteriously the first 30 fibonacci numbers isn’t allowed.