So Much Sorting

I put on my sorting hat and watched many, many videos on sorting. The videos covered: bubble sort selection sort insertion sort heap sort merge sort quicksort counting sort radix sort There are several more sorting algorithms I could have gone into, but I had to stop somewhere. I’d like to…

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My Summer Reading List

Technically, I started reading in April, but look at that stack! I’m not spending too much time reading on a daily basis right now. I want to get past the learning phase, then once I’ve had enough exposure to the main requirements for a coding interview, I’ll spend half the day…

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Splay Trees: The Pretty Much Perfect Binary Search Tree

Splay trees are very simple as far as structure. A splay tree a binary search tree, so each node has a key, maybe a left child, and maybe a right child. There’s no subtree height, ranking info, or anything else. It’s pretty simple. It’s the splay algorithm that gives the splay…

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An Astounding Example of Efficiency with B-Trees

I’ve been sitting at self-balancing binary and other k-ary trees for a while, and I should be moving on to sorting algorithms tomorrow. But I was really amazed by an example of B-Tree usage in quick data accesses, that minimizes disk accesses in a smart way. I wanted to share it. From…

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Working to Become a Unix/Linux Master Plumber

I’ve been reading an old but great book, The Unix Programming Environment (1984), by Brian Kernighan (of K&R C fame) and Rob Pike. I think it’s no longer in print, because the price on Amazon for a new paperback is over $50. On Half.com you can find it for less than $10. The book…

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UX Makeover: My Terrible Pricing Page

I can call it terrible, because I designed it. – me The Just Really Bad Page Last week I spent some time overhauling the pricing page on TalkToTheManager. We had put out a new pricing page with the advent of text message surveys, and after about 2 months I revisited the pricing page and,…

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Priority Queues: Heap Implementation

I made a departure after studying binary search trees to visit priority queues and heaps. I had planned to do this one later, but it kept coming up in lectures. I really like heaps. They are space and operation efficient, easy to understand and code, and make sorting easy. What’s not to…

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Flash Cards Site Complete

As I mentioned a few days ago, I was putting things on hold for a bit to put together a quick little website that would let me create, manage, and memorize flash cards, so I can keep all this computer science info in my brain. The site it done! It’s very simple and was built…

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Exploring Endianness (Octet Ordering)

As I get deeper into my computer science studies, I’m learning about Endianness. More on this subject here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness Endianness is the ordering of octets in memory and ISAs (instruction set architecture), but not CPU registers. Big-endian stores the most…

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