Today in my Programming from A to Z course we’ll be going over how to program a simple concordance in Java storing words in a binary search tree. It may be hairy, but I hope it proves to be a useful means for improving the programming skills of ITP students. . . if any data structure / algorithm gurus wander by this site, please feel free to correct any mistakes i’ve made in this initial tutorial. . . being the severely flawed human being that i am, i’m sure they exist. .
Some rather poorly shot and quickly slapped together footage from the installation in Savannah.
I’m in Savannah, GA working on installing some of my work at the new Jepson Center for the Arts, which will have its grand opening in March, 2006.
Week two of the nature of code tutorials is up. I guess I don’t really need to post announcements here each time a new tutorial goes up, but at least it gives the appearance that I’m keeping this blog (oh dear, I have a blog, how embarrasing) up-to-date. . .
Oh, and for that matter, a new tutorial about regular expressions in Java for the Programming from A to Z class is available too. Let the world of regular expression masters slowly pick it apart for all its inadequacies. . .
A terrific programmer and artist toxi has written up some thoughts about “Code (with a capital C)” and Processing. The post inspired a great deal of discussion on the Processing forum as well as a second and third post on toxi’s blog.
I was about to post some of my thoughts on the forum and here, but realized, eh, what do I really know. Who better to respond and discuss this topic than those in my nature of code class? So, well, I made it “homework. . . ” Post away! (use the comments here to leave your response, but feel free to post to the Processing forum as well.)
Ok, so the first edition of the new revised nature of code tutorials is up and online. As I continue to update the lessons over the course of the semester, I’ll slowly take the old site down. Comments, critiques, welcome!
“Babble” is a quick experiment inspired by Gnoetry. Gnoetry creates poetry by placing words next to each other according to how they appear statistically in a source text. Babble does exactly the same thing, however, on a character by character level. Babble analyzes a source text and calculates the probability for any character to appear after another character, generating a new text based on these probabilities. The result is mostly gibberish, but some amusing text emerges that vaguely resembles actual language. This will be greatly improved after I upgrade it to compute the probabilities for each character to appear in triplets (instead of pairs). . .
Can you guess the source text for this demo?
My first tutorial for my new course Programming from A to Z is up and online. I’m having an issue on the site where wordpress is adding extra slashes before quotes when I post code using the pre-formatted tags. . . still have a few things to clean-up, but it’s there now. . . . comments, suggestions, critiques welcome! The examples are currently all Java, but hopefully I’ll have Perl and PHP versions up soon. . .
Some would say it’s weird to love a web hosting company. But I guess I’m weird that way. Because I love dreamhost. I really do. And before today, I always thought it was unrequited . . . no longer, we will live happily ever after. . .
