Author Archives: Wyrd Smythe

Musical Scale Modes Table

01 Sunday Oct 2023

Posted by in Fun, Python

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,

Mathematician and educator John Baez has an excellent series of blog posts about music theory. The seventh concerns generating scales by using notes separated by fifths. Shifting the start point generates the seven major scale modes. Shifting the root key generates those seven modes in the twelve keys (a total of 7×12=84 scales).

John asked if any of his readers would be interested in creating that table of all 84 rows. It sounded like — and turned out to be — a fun exercise. This post explores in detail the Python solution I came up with.

Continue reading →

Calculating the Number e (in Python)

10 Sunday Sep 2023

Posted by in Fun, Python

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , ,

It has been almost a year since my last post here. I haven’t been idle code-wise, but I have been too distracted by Real Life to do any blogging here. My publication rate is way down on my main blog, too.

To get me posting here more, I think I need more of a focus on casually documenting my own little projects rather than Code Wise articles. Those take more work than I seem willing to put in these days. With that in mind, I have some trivial Python fun to share…

Continue reading →

Python String Translate

13 Thursday Oct 2022

Posted by in Python

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

, , ,

Python str instances have many useful methods. I use strip, split, startswith, and others, quite a lot, for instance. One method I haven’t had reason to use so far is translate. It takes a dictionary argument and uses it to map the existing string to a new string.

It’s flexible and useful, so it’s worth knowing how to use.

Continue reading →

Regular Expressions

23 Thursday Jun 2022

Posted by in CS101

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

There are many general skills a programmer should have to be effective and valuable. Some are very general — for instance, the ability to learn and to think abstractly — but some are more specific — various tools and tricks of skilled programming.

Among those tools are several non-programming languages all programmers should know. Those include HTML, XML, SQL, and an old one whose name doesn’t end with “L” — Regular Expressions (aka REs, aka RegEx or RegExp).

Continue reading →

Loving the Lambda

15 Saturday Jan 2022

Posted by in Python

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

One part of Python I especially appreciate is lambda functions. While I’ve never pursued functional programming, I do like many things about it, particularly the notion of functions as native data objects. Programming with functional objects opens new vistas. Most languages handle it one way or another, but languages make it natural.

Python’s lambda is such a facility, and I use it often. This week I finally got around to writing a lambda function I’ve been meaning to for a long time, and it’s my new favorite. I thought I’d share it along with some of my other “one-liners”…

Continue reading →

Failure Tales

10 Monday Jan 2022

Posted by in Stories

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

,

In job interviews they sometimes ask about a time you failed. It’s meant as a probe into your self-image and reactions. How you react when challenged; what do you do about obstacles. I suspect anyone whose career revolves around solving problems has a few stories about “the one that got away.”

A recent online conversation inadvertently reminded me of all three that stand out in my history. I made a note to write a post about them. The new year seems like a good time for a trip down memory lane…

Continue reading →

Naming Things (redux)

27 Monday Dec 2021

Posted by in CS101

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , ,

The first article (long, long ago) about naming things only scratched the surface. Even with company and language guidelines (or other rules) to help, with so many things to name it’s easy to lose control. Even now, after 44 years of writing code, I still sometimes find myself staring at the screen trying to think of what to name some object.

It’s understandable; there are a lot of things to think about when it comes to a name.

Continue reading →

Calculating Entropy (in Python)

21 Tuesday Dec 2021

Posted by in Python

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

, ,

I’ve been playing with calculating the entropy of a toy system used to illustrate the connection between “disorder” and entropy. (See Entropy 101 and Entropy 102.) I needed to calculate the minimum number of moves required to sort a disordered collection, but that turns out to be an NP problem (no doubt related to Traveling Salesman).

The illustration bridges Boltzmann and Shannon entropy, which got me playing around with the latter, and that led to some practical results. This article describes the code I used mainly as an excuse to try embedding my own colorized source code blocks.

Continue reading →