A primer on elementary cellular automata — After my previous post on PBM and PNG images and ImageMagick, I was interested in doing some more image manipulation, and decided to explore ways to create PNG files by generating visualisations of elementary cellular automata. This post provides some background information about cellular automata before that. A cellular automaton…

For quick and dirty HTTPS deployments — This post was originally posted on my blog at https://blog.jiayu.co/2018/08/a-simple-https-reverse-proxy/. I don’t post to Medium as often nowadays, so follow me there if you like what I write! You can find a RSS feed at https://blog.jiayu.co/index.xml, or just check in every now and then! 🙂 Over the past decade, there…

Playing with PBM files and ImageMagick — I’ve always been a fan of geometric patterns. When I was younger I used to draw Sierpinski triangles in class after a classmate (hi Marken) introduced them to me. I was fascinated by how hexagons tessellated after playing and designing maps for The Battle for Wesnoth, an open-source, turn-based strategy…

In case your corporate proxy blocks gists — GitHub Gists are extremely handy for sharing self-contained chunks of information like code snippets, short scripts and even complete articles. However, I recently found myself working behind a corporate proxy which blocked access to gists, probably because of data loss prevention concerns. …

Analyse FPL data with SQL — Recently, I downloaded some data from the FPL website and ingested it into a SQLite database so it could be queried and explored with SQL and potentially exported to other formats such as CSV afterwards. Here are some things you can do with it: An example query selecting the top…

Applying Benford’s law to submission scores and number of comments — Benford’s law is the observation that in many numerical datasets, the distribution of leading digits is not uniform — the first digit of any number in the dataset is much more likely to be a 1 than a 9 (30.1% vs 4.6% for numbers in base-10). Here’s a plot for…

Fun with zero-width spaces in WhatsApp — On Reddit or other forums, you’ll often come across spoiler tags. They’re used to discuss spoilers while protecting other readers who do not wish to be spoiled by requiring them to actively interact with the spoiler tag to view its contents. Conspicuously, spoiler tags are a missing feature in most…

Moving away from Medium (but not too far) — In June last year, I started a blog on Medium and wrote my first post on the highly public Lee family feud over their family home which was taking place around that time. …

Generating Reddit comments with Markov chains — Previously, we generated some new sentences from a small pool of existing sentences. Now, we’ll generate some new comments based on all the existing comments in a Reddit thread! This post is a continuation of “A Primer on Markov Chains”, which introduces Markov chains and how they can be used…