Last year I was a teaching assistant for two quarters giving me two opportunities to see how well I could share my knowledge with students. Aside from my knowledge of the material, and my ability to relate to many of the undergrads at UCSB (having previously been one myself) I …

Update 2011/02/25 12:07
Updated the code such that it doesn’t rely on a coin of denomination one.

I assisted in hosting the UCSB Programming Competition again this year. Doing so rekindled my love for dynamic programming algorithms, thus why I prepared an example similar to this …

Wow, where has the time gone? In my absence a great deal has happened in my life so I’m going to break it up into a few chunks starting with stuff prior to the summer.

As I briefly mentioned in Flat Stanley’s Adventures, winter quarter I TAed the …

I was just watching the keynote for Google I/O in which Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt said, “I’m one of these people who believes Computer Science is at the center of the Universe.” I think this is one of my new favorite quotes. Quote at 4:34 in …

I previously mentioned that I was the Teaching Assistant (TA) for the Operating Systems class this quarter. It’s going quite well, though just as I remember, this class is a lot of work for the students, and a hell of a lot of work for the TA. I recently …

This past weekend my littlest brother pitched for the first time. Word has it that he pitched 3 consecutive strikeouts! Go Connor. However, this word needs to be taken with a grain of salt as it comes from our mom, who as most moms do, occasionally neglect unfavorable details.

My …

I turned my computer on this morning and to my dismay my 9 month old 1TB harddrive could no longer be detected. It is still under warranty so it’s no big deal about the hardware going bad, however it is a big deal that I didn’t have a …

Update 2011-07-18: As Ernesto correctly points out in the comments, this algorithm selects N independent random lines from a file.

The following is my python implementation of choosing N random lines with equal probability from a file. This implementation is both memory and time efficient unlike other solutions. This problem …

Next quarter I am TAing the Operating Systems course at UCSB, which was one of my favorite classes (I even mentioned it here- see junior year), despite it being considered the most difficult required Computer Science course. For our class of ~50 students we had 3 TAs for whom this …

My brother Connor recently mailed me a letter that read:

Dear Friends and Family,
In Social Studies we have been discussing communities and what makes them work. To help us learn more about other places, we would like to ask you for your help. Included in this letter is our …