LaTeX

LaTeX, originally TeX is the name of a markup language as well as the piece of software that renders it. It was created by Don Knuth and later extended by Leslie Lamport. You can read more about LaTeX on Wikipedia and the LaTeX project website, but essentially it’s an application that allows you to produce documents.

Why LaTeX

Not WYSIWYG

Unlike Microsoft Word, LaTeX is not WYSIWYG (it’s not “what you see is what you get”). This means you’ll write text, press a button and then the application will turn that text into your final document and look amazing. There’s a huge and not-so-obvious advantage to this. When you write text in Word or Pages, you will spend a lot of time tweaking spaces, font sizes, line heights and such in order to obtain the visuals you want. What you want is things to line up properly, spacing to be even and pages and paragraphs to break at the right spot...

Got some free time? maybe it’s an opportunity for a road trip. Massachusetts has a lot of places worth driving to that could suck out that free time you have like a black hole.

Food

Cape Cod

I’m slightly cheating by starting off with the Cape because this is an obvious one. For those not from MA, Cape Cod is that little branch at the bottom right. Driving to Cape Cod takes an incredibly long time. There’s only one lane most of the road through the Cape, extending over 65 miles from end to end. Now for the good part, you will find the town of Wellfleet followed by Provincetown at the tip of the Cape.

Cap Cod has many beaches, bike routes and essentially chances to do physical activity. Personally when I go to the Cape I do the exact opposite: I go there for the food, which is basically the primary reason I go anywhere. Cape Cod is abundant with joints serving clams, lobster, fish...

My name is Kiki. My days mostly consist of eating, pooping and sleeping. I usually eat grain or vegetables but my favorite is electric cables. Wires and cables taste amazing and the more expensive the better. My favorite is Apple cables, the ones that cost over $20 such as lightning or thunderbolt cables. HDMI cables are also pretty good. Though I think I binge bite cables to forget the fact that my lifespan is just 2³ years.

8 years isn’t a whole lot, it’s the time it took Amazon to become profitable. It took me over a week to figure out where the water is, my odds aren’t looking good to do something with my startup idea. Did I tell you I have a startup idea? It’s a salad delivery service. I haven’t figured out the business model yet but I sure could use the service, that’s how I came up with the idea. I started work solving the traveling salesman problem. Efficient delivery is the...

I’ve always wanted to build my own house. I’m an outlier and a software engineer. When I look at most houses I see inconsistent design, lines that don’t align, colors that don’t match, materials that don’t last, inefficient space use, poor placement of air vents and essentially everything that makes for a flawed design. I won’t talk so much about design as much as tools for designing, because I’m simply not an architect.

Pen and paper is a good start for designing a floor plan. If you don’t forget you need a closet for an HVAC, space for a washing machine or a spot to place the electric panel then it should be a good way to arrange walls and space. However, there are limitations: the two-dimensional seen-from-top view of a house doesn’t allow you to visualize the more complex design elements.

This is the point where architecture design software comes in. Unfortunately it’s really...

I just acquired a used Dell server on eBay for a total of $170 including shipping. I mostly bought it to experiment with OpenStack, do some benchmarks and such. Coincidentally I also recently read about the rise of Dogecoins, so I thought I’d try “mining”, or “digging” as they say for Doge.

I installed Ubuntu Server 12.04LTS, joined the DogeHouse mining pool and installed the cpu-miner program and started digging. It is considered inefficient to mine virtual currencies using CPU’s, since GPU’s tend to provide a better hashing rate. Unfortunately my blade doesn’t come with a graphics card and I’m not planning on buying one, I’m just curious about how much I can mine using what I have.

Server specs

• Dell CS24-SC server
• 2x L5420 Quad Core Intel Xeon 2.5GHz CPU’s
• 8GB RAM (2x 4GB) PC2-5300P
• 2x 500GB 7.2K SATA HDD’s
• 400W Power Supply

Mining

With the setup described above, I obtain a...

I met Don Knuth in 2007 when I was 17. He owed me $2.56 and I wanted to trade my finding for the check in person, with the hope that I could shake his hand and maybe get a couple books signed.

Dr. Donald Knuth is a famous Computer Scientist and professor at Stanford University. He is most well-known for writing The Art of Computer Programming, as well as implementing TeX.

Dr. Knuth has written a lot of software and would usually reward people for finding bugs in his programs. The reward is one hexadecimal dollar (0x$). Unfortunately $256 is a lot so the reward is actually $2.56. Every time someone finds a new bug, the reward doubles. Don Knuth also rewards people who find mistakes in his books.

I really wanted to get my hex dollar and finding a bug in his programs is no easy task. Finding errors in his books isn’t much easier, especially when your native language is French and...

Markdown is a very simple markup language that’s quite popular right now, notably it is the one used by Svbtle. Markdown was mostly designed for casual writing, but it turns out that I casually write things in ways that most people don’t.

When I don’t write online I use LaTeX. I use it for everything from homework to recipes. It is a tool designed and implemented by Don Knuth and improved by Leslie Lamport (TeX -> LaTeX). LaTeX allows people to write research papers, books etc. and features a complex and powerful markup language. I like LaTeX very much because it allows me to display math equations beautifully. Unfortunately Markdown doesn’t natively allow users to write math in such a fashion.

I did some research and found out it is possible to integrate LaTeX equations with Markdown, except Svbtle doesn’t provide it. The only solution is to embed an image of the equation into your...

This weekend I decided to refresh on C++ in preparation for some interviews. I tried to pick a project that I could code in roughly one day. It should not only have me review C++ but force me to solve some problems and implement some data structures I don’t necessarily use every day.

Idea

Anagrams allows you to find anagrams in the English dictionary for any given set of characters, then prints them out in alphabetical order, while displaying some stats.

Goals

My goal is not to build something that just works, but to actually build a decent solution that’s efficient and lightweight, while exploring a few things. This is neither the quickest to implement nor the most efficient, so please view this post more as a study.

Problems

Here are some very basic to average problems that building this program entails:

• Storing an English language dictionary that the program can read
• Storing...

Driving in Japan is great and you should do it. So far I’ve driven four times in Japan and discovered new things every time. So before anything, there are some requirements:

• You must be 18 years old or older
• You need to hold a valid US, French, British or Swiss driver’s license (Don’t know about other countries but it doesn’t look good)
• If it is a US or British driver’s license then you need an international driving permit, otherwise you will need a Japanese certified translation of your driver’s license (see links at the bottom)
• 2 months of planning (trust me on this)
• A sense of adventure

Obtaining a car

So first off, you need a way to obtain a car. That’s not so hard, you can rent one. You can simply go to your favorite car rental company, let’s say Avis and select Japan in the drop down; surprise: Japan is not there. In Japan, the leading rental companies are actually car...