Hrvoje's Blog

Drawing Circles

Wed, 20 May 2020 20:58:30 +0000

Embedded programming, microcontrollers and FPGAs have always been incredibly appealing to me. Why? Probably because they emphasize things about development and design that I personally believe to be very important - keeping things short, efficient and simple. Recently, I needed to draw circles with as little code as possible which always get me into the “is there a better way” mode.

The Eagle Has Landed

Thu, 03 Dec 2015 11:47:55 +0100

The year was 1984. Apple Macintosh was just introduced, as well as our own shiny new computer called “Orao” (Eagle). It ended up being chosen as a standard primary school computer in Croatia from 1985 to 1991. For many of us, kids back then, this was one of the first opportunities to ever use a computer.

Ghost Ship

Wed, 15 Jul 2015 15:29:34 +0200

Lately I’ve been solving some problems on CheckiO, a really addictive programming site, and stumbled upon a very interesting golf mission. So, you might ask: “What are golf missions?!”. The idea is to solve the problem using as little code as theoretically possible. Your score is inversely related to code length and transforms a mildly challenging problem into a very addictive one.

One of the most interesting missions is called Ghost Detect. It might not seem special at first, but it gets tricky as solutions get shorter. The mission goal is to write the shortest possible code to recognize if three consecutive signals sent in binary are of the same length. 11000001100011 is a good signal while 111000100011 is a bad one. There is at least one zero between every group of ones. For each character used (less than 200) you earn 1 point. So, how do we do this?

Cookie Math

Sat, 17 Jan 2015 15:53:09 +0100

There was a very interesting presentation at the last 31C3 conference given by two very talented security researchers: Shahar Tal and Lior Oppenheim. The vulnerability they found targets many different routers from various manufacturers and was, apparently, patched 10 years ago (!) by the software company who made RomPager, the software in question. Let’s just say vendors are slow in deploying patches, leaving tens of millions of routers vulnerable to potential remote bricking, turning into botnets or who knows what else. It was named Misfortune Cookie for a good reason, but what does that have to do with math?

Tic-Tac-Toe in ... MySQL

Sun, 05 Oct 2014 17:25:44 +0200

If you ever attended a boring lecture, you probably know this game by heart. Frequently scribbled on textbook margins and school desks, it’s insanely popular and fun to play. Talking to a friend about MySQL made me wonder if such a respectable, high performance database can be misused and tricked into being a gaming platfom. While it isn’t likely going to run Quake, maybe a simple game of Tic-Tac-Toe would be just right.

Why would anyone do this? Well, making floppy drives play The Imperial March isn’t very useful either, but it’s darn entertaining. MySQL is a powerful tool with strong scripting capabilities and Turing complete as well, so implementing this game in a single player mode is possible.

My friend's 2048 version

Sat, 27 Sep 2014 16:37:58 +0200

Recently I tried implementing a cool game called 2048 in Python and make it as short as possible. Thinking I did a decent job, I challenged a friend to give it a go. Blown away how much shorter it turned out to be, all I can say is - kudos to Veky.

A simple 2048 clone in Python

Sat, 20 Sep 2014 01:11:35 +0200

Every now and then a viral game shows up. It is difficult to name a particular quality which makes a game popular, but most people would probably describe it as addictive. 2048 is just that, despite its remarkable simplicity. Soon, I started wondering how many lines of code would it take to write it and what are the bare essentials of the game, and tried writing my own version.