Producer and Consumer

Hope you are doing well. I fully understand that not all countries are moving quickly to vaccinate most their population against COVID-19. Hopefully the efforts have already started and will be completed soon. Here in the USA it seems that every state is moving at its own pace. That said, a large amount of people have received at least the first of two jabs. The youngest I know of is of age 21. The world needs to get as much of its population vaccinated as possible to achieve herd immunity. If this is not done the virus will continue to mutate and the threat of COVID-19 might remain for years or decades.

It seems that Israel is leading the vaccination process. As in many other countries, there are some people that do not wish to get vaccinated. The prime minister of Israel has made some clever, and for what I understand legal changes to motivate all their citizens and residents to get a COVID-19 vaccine.

In a nutshell the idea is that the good of the majority needs to prevail. People will not be forced to get a vaccine unless there are medical reasons. Besides that, the population needs to show a vaccine passport to work where there is human contact with others. If the person wishes to attend events and places where they could possibly transmit COVID-19, they need to have a COVID test in the previous 48 hours. The COVID tests used to be free but in the near future people will need to pay for a test. So if a person for without a real medical issue does to get the vaccine but wishes to mix and mingle with others, they will have to pay and get a COVID test every other day. I guess Israel will be one of the countries that will reach heard immunity in the very near future. In my humble opinion, we in the USA need to start thinking about each other and work for a common goal. Continue reading “Producer and Consumer”

Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree

Things might be getting somewhat more complex with the COVID-19 pandemic that started in Wuhan, China. The CDC has been posting articles stating that individuals, who have recovered from COVID-19, may be prone to reinfection after three months. The theory of herd immunity, without a vaccine, goes out the door.

On a side note, people in the city of Wuhan, China have been celebrating that coronavirus is receding (there is no way to find out with data what is actually happening there) in their city with a massive water park party. The Chinese Communist Party does not seem to accept responsibility for the 800,000 deaths globally which they allowed to happen and are taking advantage of it in different ways. Continue reading “Lowest Common Ancestor of a Binary Tree”

Added new CLI to the iCAS

It is another Saturday in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Last night I changed the alarm to wake up at 05:15 AM. That said I was up around 05:00 AM. My wife and her friend want to get an early start shopping. They should be back around 11:00 AM. They both took masks, gloves and umbrellas. The forecast does not call for rain in this area, but around the time they were leaving there were some spotty dark clouds.

The latest and greatest on liberals is to allow defilement of statues of Christopher Columbus around the country. Not sure what is the point and more important what will change with such actions. Continue reading “Added new CLI to the iCAS”

Re-Space

UPDATE – The format for the code for the class TrieNode has been addressed. Sorry for the inconvenience.

It is Friday and my youngest and family will be arriving this afternoon for a weekend long visit. My wife and I are getting ready for their arrival later today. We all enjoy good food so we have an extensive menu planned which includes fugazza, pasta carbonara with lots of pancetta, beef roast with a homemade tomato sauce, limoncello cake and different alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.

Let’s get to the main subject of this post. I tackled problem 17.13 from the Cracking the Coding Interview book. The problem is name Re-Space. Continue reading “Re-Space”

BST Search

It is a Saturday in August in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and it is going to be a warm and humid day. My wife is out shopping with a friend and I am in my home office having fun with Binary Search Trees (BSTs).

This past week I was talking with a software engineer about coding interviews. I have mixed thoughts about them. Not sure about their value as far as finding out if a person is able to develop quality software. Allow me to describe the process which seems to be quite spread around the industry.

The candidate is interviewed by multiple technical people. The idea is to present the candidate with a set of one or more programming problems and expect working code written on a whiteboard. Typically the programming language of choice is up to the candidate. Continue reading “BST Search”

Basic RESTful Service – Part I

One can use different programming languages, frameworks and libraries to develop a RESTful web server which exposes the same API. In this post I will implement a RESTful server using JavaScript, Express, and npm libraries.

Given that one needs to start with some level of requirements, we will use the following short and simple statement:

“Implement a very simple RESTful API for a storage server that supports store, query, retrieve and delete operations using DICOM data”. Continue reading “Basic RESTful Service – Part I”

Distance Between Nodes in a BST

I was looking at several articles on binary trees and thought it would be a good opportunity to write some Java code in order to refresh knowledge of binary trees, in particular with BSTs (Binary Search Trees). You never know what new things are out there.

I am not sure if most system architects and software developers run into the same situation as I do. I have learned and worked with many data structures and programming languages. I do not work with every single data structure often enough that I recall how to implement or use it as far as all the associated methods and functions. I have a reasonable understanding of most data structures and I can get back on the horse rather quickly. Continue reading “Distance Between Nodes in a BST”

Smart Delay with Fibonacci

In the past few weeks I have been cleaning and optimizing some operations in a storage server. After running millions of operations I noticed an interesting condition and decided to use a different approach. Did a quick Internet search using Google Chrome for “smart delays” and nothing related seemed to come up. I thought using it for a title for this post would be fine. Continue reading “Smart Delay with Fibonacci”

Testing With Dependency Inversion

Earlier this week I was talking with a system architect. He mentioned what I consider a sensitive and interesting question. How do you use Dependency Inversion (DI) to test software? If you are interested in this question please stop reading and allow yourself a few minutes thinking about the question and associated answer. Continue reading “Testing With Dependency Inversion”

Linked List – Part VI

I believe that I am finished with the implementation and testing of the DoubleLinkList class using templates in C++. At this point I should be able to start using the class. Hope to get to that sometime this weekend.

Following is the screen capture of a console displayed on my Windows
machine using Visual Studio 2013 while running the test code for double linked lists: Continue reading “Linked List – Part VI”