Ben Wendt's blog

I’ve posted a random password generator I’ve written to github.

Here’s a talk I gave at work.

The goal of stemming is to reduce derived forms of a word to something that could be a root form.

I’m using Gin Gonic on a project I’m working on at work these days.

Long ago I wrote about the benefits of memoization.

This is a simple modification of the espruino motion detector tutorial to work with the espruino pico.

About a year ago I had a little fun using an espruino.

At my new job I’ve been working a fair bit with ui router.

My wife recently developed an interest in semordnilaps, so I thought I would take a stab at writing a script that will find some.

A mixin is a class-like language construct meant to add functionality to another class.

Wanting to expand my horizons a little, I decided to give android game development a try.

In my previous post, I discussed some tokenization techniques and mentioned that a whitespace-only tokenizer will make tokens that are sub-optimal for indexing.

Introduction A text index is a way to store information about textual data to improve ease of retrieval.

The ADT-1 is a neat little machine.

This will make a nice semi transparent spinner for you. var spinnyCanvas = function(left, top) { var conti = false; var self = this; this.stop = function() { this.conti = false; } this.start = function() { console.log(s…

Javascript has a with statement that you probably shouldn’t use.

PHP 5.4 discontinued support for SQLite 2 databases.

Having studied math in university, I am well aware that buying lottery tickets is a losing proposition.

I have a thing for sorting algorithms.

For my fun projects that include color, I like to use the following palette in the HSL space: random hue full saturation 50% lightness This is easy in HTML because HSL is in the CSS specification and it has great cross browser support.

Underscore.js has been ported to Underscore.PHP.

Setting up a very simple blog with laravel is quite easy.

FirefoxOS development is really easy if you have experience with front-end web development.

Humans, like computers, have long term and short term memory.

Communication with an Espruino is done by sending JavaScript in string format over a serial port interface.

I was excited yesterday to see that my Espruino, which I backed on Kick Starter, had arrived in the mail.

Magento’s built in addJs method in the Mage_Page_Block_Html_Head class assumes that files will be hosted locally.

The memento pattern is a design pattern used to store and revert states for objects which support this capacity.

Suppose you have ten text sources, and you generate a new block of text trained from each, and you want to give each its own weighting.

Here’s another super-simple design pattern, implemented in PHP. class Registry { private $values = array(); public function get($key) { if (!

An n-cube is a geometric shape analogous to a cube, but in an arbitrary number of dimensions.

How to Write a Spelling Corrector, by Peter Norvig, is a popular resource for instructions on how to produce spell check functionality.

Consider if you need a 7-dimensional lattice data structure.

As of Excel 2007, files are saved in the Open XML format.

The Knuth-Morris-Pratt string search algorithm is an algorithm for finding a substring within another string that uses information calculated about the substring to speed up the search process.

Consider a spell checker program: a user is entering input, and for whatever reason they miss some white space while entering input, so that something like The Sun Also Rises is entered as The Sun AlsoRises.

It’s often useful to time aspects of your applications.

Fermat’s Last Theorem States that there are no non-trivial integer solutions solutions to the equation: x^{n} + y^{n} = z^{n}, n > 2 This theorem went unproven for centuries, and was proven to be true in 1995 by Andrew Wiles.

Memoization is a programming technique where you save expensive computations in memory to speed up function execution time.

Given a string like 2 * 2 + 2, how would you calculate the value?

I’ve looked at making promises in PHP before, but it was a bit pointless due to PHP’s synchronous nature.

Sleep Sort is a humourous algorithm for sorting.

I’ve looked at Sleep Sorting before.

The observer pattern is a nifty way to decouple objects from one another.

Consider the following three scenarios: class Dog { ...

A promise is a way to defer the execution of a given routine until the data it needs to run is ready.

Longest common substring is a function that can be useful once in a while.

Short of going to something more complex like measuring information or doing some natural language processing, you can estimate which element on a page contains the content by determining which element has the highest ratio of contained content to contain…

Here’s a simple Markov chain implementation in PHP, loosely adapted from this excellent write up about implementing Markov chains in javascript: class Link { private $nexts = array(); public function addNextWord($word) { if (!

In mathematics, a fixed point is an input x for a function f such that f(x) = x The Mandelbrot Set is a visualization of which points near 0 in the complex plane are fixed points for the function , where .