Ben Wendt's blog

Long ago I wrote about the benefits of memoization. It’s a simple idea: a time vs. space trade off. Trade time in CPU for space in memory. A pretty classic example is the massive speed benefit you can get while calculating the Fibonacci sequence by saving values you have already found. (The naive recursive approach recalculates values an exponential number of times.) It’s a toy example but it definitely exhibits the power of the technique.

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This is a simple modification of the espruino motion detector tutorial to work with the espruino pico. The main difference is which pins things are hooked up to, and my not using the LED strips, which I don’t own (hint hint, Santa).

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About a year ago I had a little fun using an espruino. I recently “kick-started” their more recent product the espruino pico. This one did really well on kickstarter and I got some great “boost” rewards like an LCD screen and some relays. It should be fun to see what this thing can do.

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At my new job I’ve been working a fair bit with ui router. It’s a fun library and I thought I would brush up a bit and have some fun practice interfacing it with the wordpress api plugin through restangular.

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My wife recently developed an interest in semordnilaps, so I thought I would take a stab at writing a script that will find some. What I came up with finds a subset of all two word to two word semordnilaps. Generally you don’t consider whitespace and punctuation in palindromes and semordnilaps, so this code doesn’t either.

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A mixin is a class-like language construct meant to add functionality to another class. They are not meant to stand on their own, and generally speaking they cannot. Mixins can be used to give different classes the same interface. Mixins can be compared to multiple inheritence in what they let you accomplish, but they don’t work the same way. Rather than inheriting from multiple classes, you mix them in. (Hence the obvious name.)

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In my previous post, I discussed some tokenization techniques and mentioned that a whitespace-only tokenizer will make tokens that are sub-optimal for indexing. I also mentioned that a simple solution to this is created a whitespace + punctuation tokenizer.

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