CodePlea
Random thoughts on programming
20 Jul 2018

# How to Embed an Arbitrary File in a C Program

A problem I've run into several times over the year, is that a small program I've written relies on another outside file. Maybe it needs to include an image, or maybe it relies on another small executable. It's a pain to deploy multiple files in these cases. I'd like everything nicely wrapped up into one executable.

So how do you embed a file into an executable?

Many years ago I wrote a small utility that takes a binary file for input. It then hex-encodes the file and outputs C code. The C code is an array which is initialized with the file's contents.

I just dug this program up to use it yet again, and I've decided that it'd be nice to share it.

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20 Feb 2017

# Get an email whenever you're mentioned online

I've published a few open source projects, and I noticed that sometimes they would be posted on social media sites such as Hacker News, Reddit, Lobsters, etc. Sometimes I wouldn't notice these posts until days later (if ever), which meant that I did not have an opportunity to join in the discussion.

So I built a bot that scrapes these sites and scans for keywords. It sends me an email whenever one of my projects is mentioned. I decided that it would be pretty easy to turn it into a free service that others might enjoy, and so I did.

It's called F5Bot. F5Bot just takes a list of keywords and will send you an email whenever one of those keywords is mentioned on the social media sites it monitors. It's totally free, so signup and give it a try!

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06 Jan 2017

# Incomplete Beta Function in C

The Incomplete Beta function, or regularized incomplete beta function, seems to be one of those functions that should be built into the standard libraries, but is conspicuously missing. It shows up all over the place in statistics. It's crucial to Student's t distribution, which is likely the second most important distribution in statistics after the Gaussian distribution.

I couldn't find an open-source implementation to fit my exact needs, so I'm going to give simple C code to compute it.

If you're just looking for code, check out the Github repo. If you want to learn how it works, keep reading.

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22 Dec 2016

# GoAccess, Analytics, and PHP

GoAccess is an excellent open source web log analyzer. It makes nice, fancy charts and such:

GoAccess has several modes of running, including outputting HTML, or severing HTML live with its built-in webserver. I knew I wanted to use GoAccess to analyze my server logs, but I wasn't sure what the best way to use it was.

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19 Dec 2016

# Technical Analysis Library

I recently released a technical analysis library called Tulip Indicators under the LGPL license. If you need to do technical analysis, I think it's the best library out there now.

I also released a companion project called Tulip Cell which provides the functions to Excel spreadsheets via an add-in.

And finally, I'm working on a full featured charting program that I plan to release soon: Tulip Charts.

30 Nov 2016

# Interpolating in a Triangle

Let's say we have a triangle. Maybe something like this:

Furthermore, let's say that each vertex (corner) has an associated value of some sort. For example: assume each vertex has an associated color. Perhaps we have:

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23 Aug 2016

# Exponentiation Associativity and Standard Math Notation

Someone recently told me that TinyExpr (my math expression evaluation library) had several bugs, mostly related to the precedence and associativity of the exponentiation operator. It turned out that they thought that math notation was more standardized than it actually is.

I made TinyExpr to be used in a spreadsheet-like program. Therefore, I tried to make it somewhat compatible with spreadsheets. This makes for behavior that may surprise some people. For example, TinyExpr evaluates multiple exponentiation from left-to-right by default. This behaviour is clearly documented in the Readme and can be changed with a compile-time flag.

I thought it'd be nice to do a survey of common computer languages and tools and see how they handle exponentiation precedence and associativity.

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18 Mar 2016

# Genann - Neural Network Library

I've made a simple neural network library in ANSI C called Genann. I released it as open-source on github recently. You can find it here.

A primary design goal of Genann was to be both complete and minimal. I'm happy with how close I've come to that goal. Genann implements the feed-forward algorithm, backpropagation, and not much else. It's not opinionated about how you store your data or about how you do training. It is contained in just a single C source file and header file.

Genann is also very easy to use. For example, creating a network with 2 inputs, 3 hidden neurons, and 2 outputs is as easy as:

/* inputs, hidden layers, neurons per hidden layer, outputs. */
genann *ann = genann_init(2, 1, 3, 2);

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For older articles, please see the archive.