I just finished the Stack section of Cracking the Coding Interview and came across an old puzzle - The Tower of Hanoi. I struggled with solving this problem. I wrote this elaborate, strange algorithm to try to solve it (which should have been a dead give-away that I had it wrong). Ironically enough, hidden in the 20-30 lines of code I wrote were the three lines of code I needed to solve the problem. Anyways, after beating my head in trying to solve this, I ended up going to the back of the book…

I’ve been going over the Linked List section of Cracking the Coding Interview and most times I get stumped with a problem the solution is the Runner Technique (or slow/fast pointers).

Sublime Text has rapidly become my favorite text editor. Cross platform, easy to use, great feature set. The Command Palette feature, where you can search for a feature without having to know where it is in the application, is an piece of usability brilliance. Somebody cobbled together a great step-by-step set of directions on how to install sublime on ubuntu. I wanted to give a shout-out to them and their work.

This post is going to cover installing and configuring MongoDB to use with Derby. If you’re reading this post looking to add model persistence to your Derby application but don’t know much about MongoDB, understanding MongoDB will help you understand Derby and the model system it uses.

I’ve been learning quite a bit about JavaScript in writing algorithms from Cracking the Coding Interview. I learned something new about strings in JavaScript and how they can be accessed. From MDN:

I finished my third algorithm from Cracking the Coding Interview - the Trie.

I finished my second algorithm from Cracking the Coding Interview - the Binary Heap. This algorithm racketed up the complexity from the Linked List.

In working with Twitter Bootstrap Forms, one of my favorite ways to lay out a form is using the Horizontal form layout. The layout requires a bit of css/html to get each of the form elements (the text boxes and what not) to play nicely. To add form elements to the horizontal form layout, you need the following html structure for each field:

I finished my first algorithm from Cracking the Coding Interview - the almighty Singly Linked List.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, I’m a big fan of Twitter Bootstrap. Lately I’ve been playing been with JavaScript and Derby. I want to integrate bootstrap with the POC site I’m building, and the creators of Derby have already figured out a way to do this.