jcarmody

This is in my CaseSelect JKI RCF plugin:

You don't use my plugin.

Who is John Galt? Nikola Tesla is John Galt!

from http://theoatmeal.com/comics/tesla

Very cool.

I've seen that, only the line was black and there were fewer data points.

Somehow my mind wandered from here to an old Isaac Asimov short - The Feeling of Power

[...]

"Yes. I know," said the little Technician earnestly, "but I start by saying seven times three because that's the way it works. Now seven times three is twenty-one.

"And how do you know that?" asked the congressman.

"I just remember it. It's always twenty-one on the computer. I've checked it any number of times."

"That doesn't mean it always will be though, does it?" said the congressman.

"Maybe not," stammered Aub. "I'm not a mathematician. But I always get the right answers, you see."

"Go on."

I made some progress last night re-reading the material and reviewing some of the lectures, but I may always feel like this technician.

There was an instant's silence and then General Weider said, "I don't believe it. He goes through this rigmarole and makes up numbers and multiplies and adds them this way and that, but I don't believe it. It's too complicated to be anything but hornswoggling."

Sounds like your course is using Sedgewick's book.

Yes, Sedgewick is using his book for this course.

Maybe there would be demand for my half-written book after all.

I'd read it.

I appreciate the condolences. Even when it's "expected" it's never really expected.

Anywho, all I've really been missing in the past to take my CLD (other than the CLAD ) is some current hardware experience. So hopefully I can fit the CLAD/CLD/CLA exams in sometime before the end of the year.

You don't really need any hardware experience for the CLD. And, I FTFY.

I understand the things you've both written. I also think that I understand that a brute-force approach to the "Three Sum" problem is ~N^3 because it nests loops and operates N*N*N times. I guess I understand that expanding a binary search process will lead to 'log N', but I'd only be guessing and accepting some maths that I've either forgotten or never learned.

I'm studying Union-Find algorithms this week, too. The programming assignment involves solving a percolation problem. I haven't read the problem statement, but the lectures introduced the concept and I believe I can implement an efficient algorithm because the lecture told me that the "weighted quick-union with path compression" is the best approach.

I should probably discuss this in Coursera's forums but I like the people here so much! I'm going to keep plugging away on the off chance that something will click and I'll learn something. Thanks for your comments.

Algorithms Part 1 began today...

What do you call a programmer that doesn't understand order-of-growth calculations? Hopeless?

You're welcome; I hope you stick around and enjoy/enrich LAVA.

Perhaps this? It will be True after the input goes above 3 and will go False if the input = 0. It won't change if the input is 1 or 2.

Untitled 1.vi

[...]

I am dealing with a customer who is different than the ones I had before. He likes to take all the block diagrams but refuse to pay once he has got all the code. [...]

Fool me once...

I don't understand what you mean by 'latch'. It sounds like you want to ignore the occasional error when the input comes to zero (0-2) and keep the output True, but for how long? Perhaps you mean that whatever condition exists at the beginning of execution should persist throughout. Do you want the output to be True if it begins between 3 and 10 and never go False, regardless of changes in the input?

If condition one falls on the range 3 to 10 then it should be latched as True no matter what then.

if condition two falls on the range 0 to 2 then it should be latched as False and has to reset the condition 1 and vice versa .

What shoud the output be when the input is less than 0, between 2 and 3 or greater than 10?

I'm not sure what you mean. You wrote "condition one" and "condition two", but your vi only has one input and three outputs.

[...] I even managed to mess up the test suite function that would have told me that it wasn't yet fixed. [...]

My company sometimes takes this approach with design flaws that would be too expensive to fix.

I'm not able to get this to work (LV2011, SP1, WinXP with Microsoft Speech SDK 5.1 installed). I don't get any errors, it just doesn't detect when I say something from the list. In addition, when I press the Stop button, Release Session.vi never finishes. If I enabled debugging it will finish, and LabVIEW crashes if I abort it. I wonder if this behavior offers any clues into my bigger problem of not recognizing speech.

I've "sold" three of the technicians I work with on this package; I wonder if they want my job. (They can have it )

That's the first thing I though about after posting the link. The OP doesn't reveal a location so I couldn't know if it would help.

You get an arduino as an added bonus! I bought it for my twelve-year-old son to learn on.

Even better than second-hand - http://www.sparkfun.com/products/11225

Have you taken the Udacity CS101 class?

No. It looks interesting, though, and I may preview the class to see how they build a web crawler. I had played with Python before and have been able to google answers to the questions I've had.

I took the CS101 then CS212 class

That looks like one I'd need to take. How far did you get and what did you think of it?

How does Coursera compare?

It hasn't started yet.

There's a board on the NI forums dedicated to that kind of thing - http://forums.ni.com/t5/Version-Conversion/bd-p/VersionConversion

As a CS prof once said: To become a good programmer you need to write code every day for two years. To become a great programmer you need to write code every day for ten years OR write code every day for two years and take an algorithms class.

I personally see no better education at fundamental level that A Level Computing from AQA board. [...]

I'd seen, and been intrigued by, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs at MIT OpenCourseWare before. Do any of you have any experience with this book/course? Scheme would be an interesting language to learn, and it would help me with Emacs/LISP.

Thanks for your response.

learning at least one traditional text-based language (I'm thinking C or Java here) is worth your time - using multiple languages makes it easier to think about algorithms in a generic sense rather than an implementation in one specific language.

I've got some experience with text programming - BASIC, VB, Fortran, C, Java and now Python. I'm thinking I'm going to go with Python because of its popularity and it works well with Google's App Engine. I'm going to stay away from C if I can. Python!

I've been following these forums for over five years now and can't articulate how much I get out of reading the threads. (I credit passing my CLD-R to reading them.) Over the years I've recognized the gulf that exists between my background and many of yours and have, more and more, wanted to narrow it. (I've often felt guilty about participating in a forum for Advanced Architects, because I'm neither.) I'd like to begin to change that, however, by studying the fundamentals of Computer Science.

Higher education is changing drastically in many exciting ways (don't get me started on how it' looks like a bubble getting ready to burst) and I've begun participating by taking some free, online classes. I'm better than half-way through CS253, Web Application Engineering, on Udacity.com and have signed up for Algorithms, Part 1 and Statistics 1 on Coursera.org starting in August. I've seen many other courses I'd like to take, and I'd like to ask for advice on how to begin.

Specifically, Coursera is going to offer a class on Automata, based on a 100-level course taught at Stanford University. While reading the course description I followed the link to

a free on-line textbook Foundations of Computer Science, written by Al Aho and me [Jeff Ullman], available at http://i.stanford.edu/~ullman/focs.html

I read the introduction and table of contents and think it's worth buying (don't have to, though, 'cuz it's online ), and the course worth taking.

My questions for you are: will the CS courses mentioned above help me move in my desired direction, and what other resources do you recommend for beginning a Computer Science education? I understand that what I'm going to do will take a lot of effort and time and I'm open to taking college classes (but I don't prefer that route), online courses, reading books (purchased or online)... Just about anything, really. Do you have a favorite book that will help? I'd appreciate any advice you can give.

Thank you.