Programming on CyberSpy

Program the Esp32 with ESP-IDF on Mac OS X

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 22:11:25 -0500

Programming the ESP32 on your Mac!

Go out and buy yourself a cheap little ESP32 SoC and follow these basic instructions to setup your development environment on your Mac. If you want to do some advanced C-programming to control your ESP32, this is for you. If you’d rather use Arduino and play with simple sketches then this is not for you – google how to use Arduino and off you go!

What you will need

So, of course you’ll need an ESP32 SoC development board. I recommend the SparkFun Thing. Lots of other choices, but this blog post will address some of the specific configuration considerations that you’ll need to be aware of when you select this particular device.

Julia Intro

Wed, 07 Nov 2018 15:11:45 -0500

Juliaet, Wherefore art thou?

As Yoda once said…

> YAPL - yet another programming language. Learn something new, you must.

Why Learn Julia?

Julia was designed from the beginning for high performance. Julia programs compile to efficient native code for multiple platforms via LLVM. As such, it’s an interesting programming language to take a look at as it’s a serious contender for certain classes of programming problems; most notibly, scientific and data-centric analysis.

OCaml OpenGL - Get into Gear!

Tue, 13 Mar 2018 14:41:15 -0400

OCaml and OpenGL - Getting our Functional Programming into Gear!

In my blog post for this day, I thought I’d take a look at the OCaml OpenGL library, lablgl. If you’re not already familair with openGL, I strongly suggest that you take a look at one of the tutorials available online. One that I found to be very informative; although written in c++, is opengl-tutorial. Nonetheless, in this post, we’ll look at some simple, and not so simple examples written in OCaml. But before we can do that, we need to install the requisite opam dependencies. To install lablgl, simply:

Let's Get Funky with the Camel

Fri, 09 Feb 2018 16:17:20 -0500

How many ways can we get Fun(ky)

In any programming paradigm, it’s critical to understand how we write functions - be they traditional imperative , anonymous , recursive, or functional. In this post, I will break down the different types of functions that you can write in OCaml.

Let’s start by examining the imperative function. Here’s a simple function that prints out the phrase Hello World! $n$ times, once on each line, and returns the value $n$ as its result.

OCaml Hello World and more

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 11:28:00 -0500

Well Hello There!

As tradition has it, every new programming language experience must begin with the basic Hello World. Let’s walk the the basics of how to set up our development environment specifically for OCaml and demonstrate how to compile our basic program.

Warming up our Environment

Of course we could just use our vanilla editor to enter our OCaml programs, but a more efficient work environment leverages an extensible editor that is aware of our programming language. Editors like sublime, Atom, and Visual Studio Code are some of the more popular selections. Vim and Emacs are also options, but the new tools tend to support vi/emacs style editing while offering more extensive and expansive features.

Recursion Revisited

Tue, 28 Nov 2017 15:23:02 -0500

Recursion, from more than one point-of-view.

A common programming idiom in computer science is solving a problem by self-reference, also known as recursion. In this post, we look at two different implementations of the same problem.

Solve a recursive problem in two different programming language paradigms

Let’s look at the solution to a simple problem, compute $f(x)=e^{x}$.

We will illustrate two separate solutions - one in a procedural language (python), and the other in a functional language (elixir).

Let’s start off with the functional language. Were does recursion come into play?

We define the function $f(x)=e^x$ as the infinite sum, $\text{ }f(x) = \sum_{n=0}^\infty{\frac{x^n}{n!}}$

In our solution below, we define two separate recursive functions, exp/2 and fac/1. What’s interesting to note here is how each of these functions has two separate definitions. This is an aspect of programming in elixir that elegantly uses pattern-matching to return different results depending upon the input. Our two functions nicely dovetail into the base-case and recursive case of a recursive algorithm.

For example, looking at exp/2, the first function definition returns 1 for any value of x (as indicated by the _ preceding the variable) and returns 1. This is the mathematical equivalent of $x^0=1\text{ for any }x$.

The second definition of exp/2 is the recursive case. for any value of $n\gt0$. Moreover, we define exp(x, n) as $\frac{e^x}{n!}$ + exp(x, n-1).

Similarly for the definition of fac/1 we see two definitions; one for $n=0$ and another for all values of $n\gt0$.

Visualizing the News: Grab your PILlow

Sun, 12 Nov 2017 21:32:23 -0500

A Picture’s Worth a Gazillion Bits

newsapi

This weekend, I tripped over a neat news REST-ful api called newsapi. Grab an API key and you’re off to the races.

There are tons of live headlines - News API can provide headlines from 70 worldwide sources.

There are basically two api endpoints:

Accessing the API with Python

newsapi can easily be accessed using a browser since the REST-ful method used is a GET method. But, accessing the api from the browser is limiting.

Making Heads or Tails out of Recursion and Combinatorial Math

Thu, 09 Nov 2017 21:27:05 -0500

GNU — GNU’s Not Unix

I thought I’d take a look at two topics at once and make some fun by mashing them together. Today’s topic is recursion. In computer science (and in math, although we call the equation a recurrence relation) recursion is an often misunderstood concept causing lots of panic and anxiety. In reality - it’s pretty easy once you wrap you head around the idiom.

What is recursion?

When we define a function in such a way that it calls itself, we’ve defined a recusive function. The most basic example is the Factorial function, $f(n)=n!$. We define the function recursively by defining it in reference to itself. So, recursively, we define $f(n)$ as:

Getting Visual With It

Wed, 08 Nov 2017 10:26:20 -0500

Time to Get Vizzy With It!

Like Will says:

Gettin vizzy wit it Na na na na na na na nana Na na na na nana Gettin vizzy wit it…

Plot thickens

Time to turn on the lights and see what our data objects look like when we turn them into visualized plots. Sure, we can use the print function to see the numbers within our numpy objects. Better yet, let’s turn our objects into pretty graphical images. To do so, we turn to the matplotlib library. An extensive library of plotting routines that easily allows us to render image plots into many different formats (png, jpg, pdf, etc…) - both onto the screen for quick visual inspection, or written to a file for general use.

Do the Numpy

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 15:36:43 -0500

Do the Numpy Dance, Is your Chance to do the Nump!

Sir Numpy says:

The Numpy Dance is your chance to do the nump Do the Numpy Nump, come on and do the Numpty Nump Do the Numpy Nump, just watch me do the Numpty Nump Do ya know what I’m doin’, doin’ the Numpty Nump Do the Numpy Nump, do the Numpty Nump

Start at the beginning: `NumPy`

The first library that we will investigate is numpy. Simply put, numpy allows us to represent mathematical objects like arrays and matricies of different datatypes and performs operations on those objects thereby easing the burden of writing the tedious code within your applications to do the mundane representations and operations.

Basic Math Concepts made Complicated Quickly

Sun, 15 Oct 2017 17:10:12 -0400

Fibonacci - What’s in a Name…

The man, the myth

Leonardo Fibonacci was a mathematician who lived in the middle ages and was held in high esteem for his prowess as a talented mathematician. Best known for his Fibonacci Sequence which seemingly is simple to define, yet it’s limit point (of the ratio of the last two elements of the sequence) (also known as the Greek letter Phi). The mysticism around the Golden ratio abounds due to its correlation with many natural element - both living things as well as dynamic processes.