From the Eastcoast to the Westcoast…

… gotta gotta go!

I’ve been able to witness two most superb hardcore (as in punk rock) concerts. The first was Evergreen Terrace at MTC in Cologne, the other one was Agnostic Front at Musikbunker in Aachen. I really start to become a great fan of this kind of music. Even more so, as I really like the kind of dancing in the mosh pit, that the audience gets going every time. Rock’n’Roll rulez!

BBQ and range finding code

The other day we had a very nice oriental-style BBQ at my place. Susi made a Couscous salad, while I made some hummus, a bell pepper salad, a salsa with Habanero chilis, and some marinated olives. On the meaty side, we had lamb chops and chicken wings. Very nice food indeed!

The evening ended with us all sitting still in the semi-dark of my terrace watching out for shooting stars. And we even saw some. Even one, which we will remember forever 😉

In the other life (work), I’ve written an algorithm for finding the bordering elements of contiguous ranges in a given array of ordered values. I’ve used rapid prototyping in Python before transferring the solution to C++. The Python code goes like this:

n = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7,    9, 10, 11, 12,      14, 15, 16]
end = len(n) - 1

ranges = []

def get_right(left, step):
    if left == end:
        return left
    leftmost_r = None
    i = last_i = end
    while True:
        match = n[i] - n[left] == i - left
        if (i == end and match) or i == leftmost_r:
            return last_i
        last_i = i 
        if match:
            i += step
        else:
            leftmost_r = i
            i -= step
        if step != 1:
            step /= 2

left = 0
while True:
    right = get_right(left, (len(n) - left) / 2)
    ranges.append((n[left], n[right]))
    if right == end:
        break
    else:
        left = right + 1

The basic assumption for the algorithm to work is that n contains sorted values. This allows us to do a kind of binary search, if the currently looked at range (from left to i) does not fit the criterion for a match (namely that n[i] - n[left] != i - left). Maybe this is useful for someone!

 

NP: Agnostic Front – Gotta go

My hobby: night-time cycling

A dear friend of mine told me the other day that he started to do night-time cycling tours through the empty city of Munich. I liked the idea a lot and have starting to do the same. I’m just back from my latest tour through Aachen. 12.7 km in 41 minutes. This is an average of 18.5 km/h. Not too bad for the hilly terrain, Aachen is built on. Yay!

Now Erdinger Alkoholfrei, shower, and off to bed!