Monthly Archives: June 2011

Anagramizer, a simple anagram solver in Go

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This weekend I took the family to celebrate Father’s Day away from town. We went around getting to know parts of the province we live in and never been to.

We came back yesterday and the plan today was for a nice, calm day at home (it’s a holiday of some sort here.) Then I got engaged in a game called Hanging with Friends, a mix of the traditional hangman with a bit of Scrabble.

Since English isn’t my first language, I have a limited vocabulary, which leaves me at a disadvantage against my English-speaking friends. I can handle the “hangman” part of the game where I have to guess the word my friends come up with; but when it becomes “Scrabble” and I’ve got to form words using only a given set of letters and still make them difficult enough that a native English speaker will have problems figuring them out, then it’s tough.

An itch that needed some scratching. Enter Anagramizer.

When I woke up this morning, I decided to write a little program to help me. You call it cheating, I call it having a bit of nerd fun.

Being that I’m currently in love with Go, I decided to write in that language and it was really easy and quick to do it. It took me about half an hour to write the program that did what I needed. But then…

I succumbed to the temptation and started adding bells and whistles. Admittedly it was mostly for my own amusement and trying stuff in Go, but by the time we were leaving for lunch, the program had more options than the KDE audio volume utility (see what I did just there?)

I decided to make it available to anyone who wants to play with it. It served its purpose of entertaining me for about half a day :)

It’s now available on Github and released under a BSD licence.

Euler 9 in Go

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This was surprising to me. For fun I picked one of the Euler algorithms I played with in the past and rewrote it in Go. The idea was to rewrite it idiomatically to see how different things might look. Nothing else. The very first thing I did was to get the exact algorithm and rewrite, no idiomatic changes.

package main

import "fmt"

func isTriplet(a, b, c int) bool {
        return a * a + b * b == c * c
}

func main() {
        for a := 1; a < 1000; a++ {
                for b := a + 1; b < (1000 - a) / 2; b++ {
                        c := 1000 - a - b
                        if isTriplet(a, b, c) {
                                fmt.Println(a * b * c)
                                return
                        }
                }
        }

}

What surprised me is that this thing runs in 0.005s, which is faster than the Python implementation and very close to the one in C. It surprised me because this wasn't really supposed to happen. The Go compiler isn't well optimized, especially compared to compilers with a many-years headstart.

How to set up Emacs on Windows

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Just so I have it documented somewhere for future reference, here’s how to quickly set GNU Emacs up on Windows.

  1. Download it from http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/emacs/windows/
  2. Unzip it to, say, C:\emacs or something like that
  3. Set the environment variable HOME to C:\emacs and include C:\emacs\bin to the PATH
  4. If you want to have a “Open with GNU Emacs” option on the context menu, just create a registry file (call it emacs.reg or whatever.reg) with the contents below and double-click it to import it into the registry.
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell]

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\emacsmenu]
@="Open with &GNU Emacs"

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell\emacsmenu\command]
@="C:\\emacs\\bin\\runemacs.exe \"%1\""

Et voilà! As well, for my preferred colour scheme, we need to use color-theme from http://www.nongnu.org/color-theme/ and set it up in your .emacs file:

(add-to-list 'load-path "c:/emacs/.emacs.d")
(require 'color-theme)
(color-theme-initialize)
(when (display-graphic-p)
  (color-theme-subtle-hacker)