So week 2 is winding down here at my REU in Umass amherst and its going pretty well. I know what my project has to do with (social networks) but I am not entirely sure exactly what I am doing. Everyday I get a different feel for what it is that I am doing. My professor has outlined some longer term (and interesting goals) that stand more on the theoretical aspects of social networks, but every time I have brought them up when we are talking, he gives me the “stay away from that for now” vibe. I have spent the last two weeks getting used to python, installing and using some packages (networkx and matplotlib), and writing some basic python scripts to compute some statistics on graghs. Today, I realized that some of the statistics that I had come up with on my own are very insignificant. It was an awesome feeling to finally finish coding the program to do it, looking at the output, making sure my program was correct, and then realizing that the results that I got would have been obvious to anyone with a half of a conception about the project. Oh well.
I spent a good amount of time today finding an interpreter for and learning Whitespace (check It). Ignoring the fact that the only characters used are space, tabs, and newlines, its not too bad to use. It provides a decent amount of functionality, which doesnt make doing things too much of a pain in the ass. Of course, the really awesome things about whitespace is you can embed whitespace code in other source code. In fact, today I wrote a C program that prints “1″ and a newline. It compiles and runs fine in C. But if one were to run it through a whitespace interpreter, it does the same thing! It was kind of a pain in the ass to integrate the two, so Ill probably write a program to do it for me. Since it doesnt make a difference where you put extra whitespace in C, I suspect it will be a simple process to integrate the two. If I do a decent job, I will post some source here.
All this whitespace stuff is going to be used to submit complicated solutions to trivially easy coding assignments. I will probably write a C program that just invokes the whitespace interpreter on itself and the whitespace does the rest. It could be considered a clever hack or it could just be considered stupid and annoying. I shall see I suppose.
For the sake of being a nerd, I tried to make the title of my post an instruction in whitespace, but after viewing the post, I discovered that WP ignores leading whitespace. There goes my hope of embedding whitespace programs in my post titles. Maybe I shouldn’t write my integrator program or else everything will end up with whitespace programs embedded in it.
I have been meaning to write posts on the science, thought, the meaning of life, the great beyond, stones, philosophy, pseudo-philosophy, the mind, and all those grandiose things, but I will get to it later.
