Blogs

August 18, 2023

“Modern C”: Notes on chapter 2 “The principal structure of a program”

These are my notes taken while reading chapter 2 “The principal structure of a program” from the book “Modern C” by Jens Gustedt. This chapter explains details of C grammar, distinction between declaration and definition of objects, and statements.

August 15, 2023

“Modern C”: Notes on chapter 1 “Getting started”

These are my notes taken while reading chapter 1 “Getting Started” from the book “Modern C” by Jens Gustedt. This chapter introduces imperative programming and teaches how to compile and run a C program.

August 15, 2023

“Modern C”: Notes on the book by Jens Gustedt

These are the table of contents for my notes taken while reading the book “Modern C” by Jens Gustedt, which teaches C according to new language standards, C11 and C17.

June 23, 2023

Universal initialization in C++

For my new position, I need to improve my knowledge of the C++ programming language (which I did not use basically since 2010). So I have started reading the book Discovering Modern C++ by Peter Gottschling to get up to speed with, well, modern C++.

June 5, 2023

How to use x86_64 packages in Conda on M1 Mac

If you work on an M1 Mac computer (that is, on an Apple computer with an ARM processor) and use Conda to manage Python environments and packages, sometimes you need to work with packages that are available only for x86_64 architecture, that is, for Macs with Intel processors (x86_64 is a common name for 64-bit Intel processors). For example, I ran into this problem when I wanted to go through SnakeMake tutorial, and it turned out that many bioinformatics tools (needed for the tutorial) are not available for the M1 architecture.

May 29, 2023

JavaScript: functions

As any programming language, JavaScript allows to pack useful things into functions, and it is the key to good JavaScript knowledge, to use them efficiently. In this post, I describe three ways that the functions can be declared in JavaScript, talk about visibility of variables inside the functions, how to have optional function arguments with default values, how to create closures (functions, bound to outer variables), and how to use recursion.

May 8, 2023

How to mirror GitLab repo to GitHub

If you have a GitLab repo and would like to mirror it in your GitHub account, it can be set up directly in the GitLab repo settings. Note that here we use new fine-grained tokens functionality of GitHub (which is currently in beta, as of May 2023).

April 17, 2023

Solving Perfect Squares problem using breadth-first search

I was learning recently about solving problems that use breadth-first search (BFS). This is a family of computer science algorithms that traverse tree data structures “by levels”. That is, starting at the root, we process all nodes on level 1, then all nodes on level 2, etc.

One typical application of BFS is to find the shortest path between the root and the given nodes.

To implement BFS, one should use the queue data structure.

March 27, 2023

How to reencode H.264 videos to H.265

I had videos in H.264 codec that I wanted to reencode to H.265. The reason is that H.265 (a.k.a. High Efficiency Video Codec, HEVC) is a more modern and efficient format than H.264 (a.k.a. Advanced Video Codec, AVC), which allows to keep the same quality with about twice less storage.

As I make from time to time YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok videos, which I need to backup, it is always good to store your data in the most storage-efficient format.