• Entropy

Take a list and return it’s entropy.

• Matching elements in an array

I couldn’t find something like this at the time, so fashioned this nifty function to print all combinations without repetition in a list. for example:
if the input is an array that looks like : {“0″,”1″,”2″,”3″}
It will print out the following:
01
02
03
12
13
23
The typical way a noob programmer would do with would be the cross product of the duplicate of this array, or a full loop within a loop. While this is still of complexity O(n^2) in the long run it still save some cpu cycles in the short run. Imagine trying to compare the elements of a 1000 member array. for each element compare with each element, that’s 1000*1000 iterations. The naive approach is doing 1,000,000 iterations while the above approach does (1000/2)*999 iterations or 499,000 iterations. ie. 1000 choose 2.

//NYT_query("json","javascript","[article search key]",false);
// with the 4th parameter set to false , it will only print out the total numbser of articles matching your query.

NYT_query("json","jay-z","[article search key]",true,80);
NYT_query("json","eminem","[article search key]",true,80);

//NYT_query("json","javascript","[article search key]",true,10);
//with the 4th parameter set to true, it will print out the total number and also, write each article to file.
//the txt files will be in the current working directory under a directory named {your query}  in this case it’s javascript
//some will return zero kb.  im not sure what the hell is going on with that(nyt server error status 500), but you can get most articles this way.
//the 5th paramter is to specify the maximum number of articles to write to file.  This is pretty helpful when queries like "computer" have over 120000 results

//in the future i’ll probably refine the search paramters a bit to get more accurate results such as the ability to search for all articles containing "computer" in the "technology" section of the NYTimes

function NYT_query($format,$query,$apikey,$writetoFile,$max){
        $URL = "http://api.nytimes.com/svc/search/v1/article?format=$format&query=$query&api-key=$apikey";
$html = file_get_html($URL);
$result= json_decode($html);
$arr =  $result->results;
$total = $result->total;
echo $total."\n\n";
if($writetoFile){
        if(isset($max)){
                if($max>$total){
                        $max=$total;
                }
                $maximum = floor($max/10);
        }else{
                $maximum= floor($total/10);
        }
        for($i=0;$i<$maximum;$i++){
                $url= "http://api.nytimes.com/svc/search/v1/article?format=$format&query=$query&offset=$i&api-key=$apikey";
                $html = file_get_html($url);
                $result= json_decode($html);
                $array =  $result->results;
                foreach($array as $t){
                        $title = urldecode($t->title);
                        $url = $t->url;
                        $artBody = html_entity_decode(extractArticle($url));
                       
                                if(is_dir("archive/".$query)){
                                        writeToFile("archive/".$query."/".$title.".txt",$artBody);
                                }else{
                                        mkdir("archive/".$query);
                                        writeToFile("archive/".$query."/".$title.".txt",$artBody);
                                }
                }
}
        }
}

function extractArticle($url){
$html = file_get_html($url);
$body="";
        foreach($html->find(‘.articleBody’) as $element){
                $body.= $element->plaintext."\n";
        }
        $html->clear();
        unset($html);
        return $body;
}
function writeToFile($filename,$body){
        $myFile = $filename;
        $fh = fopen($myFile, ‘w’) or die("can’t open file");
        $stringData = $body;
        fwrite($fh, $stringData);
        fclose($fh);   
}

• new york times article api function

very nice little script I made September of 2010. This makes it easy to query the nytimes api to find relative news articles in bulk.

set the artist_name to replace_chars(artist_name, " ", "+")
set the track_name to replace_chars(track_name, " ", "+")

tell application "Safari"
        activate
        set the URL of the front document to ¬
                "http://search.lyrics.astraweb.com/?word=" & artist_name & "+" & track_name & ""
end tell

on replace_chars(this_text, search_string, replacement_string)
        set AppleScript‘s text item delimiters to the search_string
        set the item_list to every text item of this_text
        set AppleScript‘s text item delimiters to the replacement_string
        set this_text to the item_list as string
        set AppleScript‘s text item delimiters to ""
        return this_text
end replace_chars

• Itunes lyrics finder

Another applescript I fashioned a while back along with the guitar tabs finder. It’s been relatively time-saving. no more clicking or typing more than a hotkey when I want to find lyrics or guitar tabs yesssss.

set the artist_name to replace_chars(artist_name, " ", "+")
set the track_name to replace_chars(track_name, " ", "+")

tell application "Safari"
        activate
        set the URL of the front document to ¬
                "http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/search.php?bn=" & artist_name & "&sn=" & track_name & "&type%5B%5D=1&type%5B%5D=3"
end tell

on replace_chars(this_text, search_string, replacement_string)
        set AppleScript‘s text item delimiters to the search_string
        set the item_list to every text item of this_text
        set AppleScript‘s text item delimiters to the replacement_string
        set this_text to the item_list as string
        set AppleScript‘s text item delimiters to ""
        return this_text
end replace_chars

• Itunes guitar tab finder

Cool applescript I made a while back that takes the currently playing song in itunes and searches utimate-guitar.com for guitar tabs. I set it up with Quicksilver to easily put the script on a hot-key combination for quick guitar tabs hunting.

• download the first 50,000,000 prime numbers

I don’t remember when i figured this out, I just remember that I was doing a programming challenge of some sorts and didn’t want to generate prime numbers.
this is a bash one-liner for those of you that didn’t get that right that right off the bat. wget is included on most unix/linux systems by default.