A Genetic Algorithm KenKen Solver

Since being introduced to KenKen a few months ago, I've been slightly addicted, so I thought it'd be interesting to try solving the puzzles in an different sort of way.

So following is a genetic algorithm solution using pyevolve.

The first thing is to define a data format to encode …

Paying for E-books

Picked up a couple of really fun looking ebooks from O'Reilly's 50%-off Cyber Monday Sale. It does feel weird to pay for something that's so easy to get for free, but at half-off, the prices were almost reasonable.

I'm mostly excited about this one: 21st Century C - so many …

One Sticky Post in Wordpress

As of Wordpress 2.7, there's a nice little feature called "Sticky Posts" that lets you specify that a particular post should be pulled out of its regular position in reverse-chronological order and placed at the top. It's a great way to draw attention to a particular post or give …

Reddit Upvoting from the Wordpress Dashboard

A few weeks ago, I wrote a plugin that we ended up not using. It's kinda cool, so I figured I would post it here instead.

Reddit has a nice mostly-json API for programmatically interacting with the site. Helpful people have also developed language-specific clients, such as the reddit-php-sdk on …

How I'm Using LessCSS with Wordpress

LESS is pretty cool. It gives you variables and some other handy tricks to make writing stylesheets a bit less tedious. There are a bunch of different ways you could setup a project to use LESS, but here's what I'm doing in Wordpress using the lessphp compiler.

functions.php

<?php …

Item-based Collaborative Filtering with Hadoop

For awhile I've been interested in the Item Based Collaborative Filter algorithm used by companies like Amazon (and probably a bunch of others now too)

So in 2009, I tried to use it to make a recommendation system for Android apps. I decided to implement it on Hadoop. This is …

Chrome pageYOffset vs IE6 fixed positioning

I spent awhile beating my head on this one today and couldn't find the answer on Google (I know!), so just documenting here for future generations - in Safari and Chrome (so probably anything webkit-based), window.pageYOffset is zero (or something small and unexpected) when you have this in your CSS …

Your Android Developer Account Will Live Forever

I've been shutting down my app business since it doesn't really make enough money to be worth the hassle of properly running a business, filing taxes, etc.. Part of that process is closing all my accounts, including the Android Developer account. Well, apparently that is not possible. Following a couple …

Automatically Save HTML of Every Page You Visit

For the last couple of weeks, I've been thinking about the best way to capture the HTML of every webpage I visit. Sure, you can always write a screen scraper or bot, but I guess I wanted something a little more organic.

The right answer to this problem is probably …

Extracting Table Data from PDFs with OCR

PDF is the ideal format for things you don't want anybody to read.

Kidding.. sort of.. I am a bit biased against PDFs. Though I reluctantly admit their usefulness in a very few situations, mostly they're just annoying. For a recent project, I wanted to extract a bunch of data …