Although a bit hesitant at first, Ryan and I ultimately attended Sarah’s New Year’s Party in Citronelle. We arrived early to help her setup, Tiki torches and all. Festivities included a nice bonfire and live music, provided by local bands Riktashaw and Powderfingers. Partygoers trickled in throughout the night. I met a lot of interesting people, and though not everything worked out the way that I would have liked it to, one thing’s for sure: this party was a heck of a lot more fun than any ASMS Alumni Retreat that I’ve ever been to. With conflicting high hopes and low spirits, I now look forward to what next year will bring. Happy New Year, everyone.

I’m surprised at how often this question pops up on interviews and undergraduate exams in imperative languages. While there are many ways to reverse a linked list, the most efficient technique by far is the use of iteration and some clever pointer manipulation. The trick is to always keep track of the previous, current, and next state of the system:

Node *reverse(Node *x) {
   Node *current = x;
   Node *previous = NULL;

   while (current != NULL) {
      Node *next = current->next;
      current->next = previous;

      /* switch to new node */
      previous = current;
      current = next;
   }

   return previous;
}

In a non-destructive functional language like Scheme, we’re trick free and perform the standard recursive approach:

(define (my-reverse a-list)
  (if (null? a-list) '()
      (append (my-reverse (cdr a-list)) 
                      (list (car a-list)))))

And just for kicks, we conclude with a deep reverse, which reverses both lists and sublists:

(define (deep-reverse a-list)
  (cond ((null? a-list) '())
        ((list? a-list) 
         (append (deep-reverse (cdr a-list)) 
                 (list (deep-reverse (car a-list)))))
         (else a-list)))

Merry Christmas, everyone. Haven’t posted in a while, but not because nothing has happened. An article proposal was recently accepted by Dr. Dobbs: Software Tools for the Professional Programmer, and it should be a lot of fun to write. I hope it goes through. Eyeing the C/C++ Users Journal next, though I’m still deciding on article topics. In the meantime, I’m spending Christmas with friends and family in Florida, in a city of perpetual rain, eating good food and playing computer games.

When generating PDF files in Linux through LaTeX, it’s sometimes necessary to edit or postprocess them on another platform, for example, when using Adobe Illustrator or the official Acrobat Acrobat software on Windows. Since Windows does not provide the necessary fonts out of the box, one must download and install Computer Modern and AMSFonts in Type 1 form. Since I always have difficulty finding these fonts when I need them, I’ve made a short post in my weblog as a reminder. The fonts are freely available for general use.

For reasons that I will never understand, Chuck decided to work on a new layout for his web site and dragged the rest of us, including myself, into a weekend of web development. I often like to think of my web site as a constantly evolving work of art that not only reflects my professional advancements in the field, but also communicates, to a certain extent, my personal growth as an individual. Let me know what you think.

While contemplating and researching my next article idea, I happened to stumble upon two, freely downloadable audio processing books by Davide Rocchesso: Introduction to Sound Processing, and The Sounding Object. There’s some great information in these texts that will really help me out in the next few months.

I’ve always been a big fan of the Adobe PDF format. It’s open, ubiquitous, supports form data, and beats most other document exchange formats hands down. That’s why it’s a little depressing that Adobe’s latest incarnation of the Acrobat Reader is so excruciatingly slow. Thankfully, Joseph Cox’s Adobe Reader SpeedUp comes to the rescue, and once again turns the Acrobat Reader into the speedy application that we all know and love. In a nutshell, it accomplishes this by removing all non-essential plugins when Acrobat is loading. There are also options to restore the original configuration if necessary. While it isn’t new news, I’m posting this because there’s still a quite a few people out there who don’t know about this handy little tweak. Thanks go to Ryan for pointing it out.

Web site development has left little time for much else this week, but the project is nearly finished. As far as my personal projects, I’ve been making a bit of progress here and there, though there’s still a lot to cover before I’ll really be able to do anything useful with the Mozilla Framework. The experience, has, however, given me great insight on how XML, CSS, and other technologies can all come together for what I honestly think will become the future of cross-platform application development. I used to believe that XML was just a buzzword, and recently I’ve been finding out just how wrong I was.

And as is typical of a computer programmer like myself, another one of my keyboards have gone out due to heavy abuse. It was just about that time of year anyway. I’ve already ordered another surplus batch, and they should arrive within the next few days. In the meantime, check out Newsmap, an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News aggregator.