Tuesday, August 16, 2005

Week 7

Progress In Project

Following the release of 0.1, pace of development has slowed down a bit. I ran out of items sitting on the list that could just be done, the others require some research...

These days, I am (in this order of priorities):
+ Reading up and experimenting with dbm (to try and package a database backed lock and poperties library with the server other than the existing shelve based libraries)
+ Attempting to debug inconsistencies with authentication that WinXP Network Places has with the server. Not having too much luck with this, there must be something I am missing.
+ Getting setup tools to use install_requires properly to download and install PyXML. Right now it does not find PyXML over PyPI, so instead I replaced it with a manual check and a print message that PyXML is required.


Google Code Jam

Like any enthusastic coder, of course I signed up for the Google Code Jam :). I tried out practice set 1, and was having trouble understanding their solution to the DiskDefrag problem (given a number of discontiguous files in a set of blocks simulating a filesystem, compute the minimum number of moves/block moving operations required to have all files in contiguous order.) The solution uses some sort of dynamic programming, but the mathematics/logic is still boiling around in my mind.

I tried a different approach by generating all valid contiguous ordered file position combinations in the filesystem and looking for the minimum number of moves from the current position to one of these valid positions. For max of 12 files and 100 block size this does not appear to be overwhelmingly intensive (but does not scale well). It worked for several test cases but running the full test shows it does not run (expectedly) within a previously-unmentioned 2 seconds limit for some test cases. Back to the drawing board.


MOBA

For anyone who was puzzled by one of the comments of the previous post, MOBA = My Own BS Algorithm, commonly refering to self-known or self-invented hacks. It is no coincidence that "a MOBA" (also known as AMOEBA) is a large single cellular organism, just like unmodular code.

I'll let users be the judge if MOBA is in the code. :)

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