I want a "good" editor to create blogs

It's been happening for quite a while.

Blogger's post editor has been playing games with me. Especially on my GATE solutions blog, where I like to keep things in a uniform format (dunno why, but it feels good to have similar formatting for similar posts - and all the posts there are similar to one another :) )

I do a 'blockquote' (that's the double quotes icon in the Compose mode), type something, want to get out of the blockquote mode for the next line, it un-blockquotes all the previous lines too. What the heck?

I select some text to delete it, Blogger decides I want to delete some surrounding text also and 'helpfully' deletes. Just for testing, I tried deleting 'Blogger' in the previous line, it deleted 'decides' along with it. What on earth can be the logic behind such a thing?

And the biggest fail here is that, when I try to undo that stupid deletion to restore order, it undoes more than I asked for and deletes some things I typed! Seriously, what did they think they were doing when they added this 'feature'? Now, just because I wanted to delete something, I have two options - either not do an undo and retype the things near the place I deleted, or do the undo and retype the things I typed recently. What if what I did not remember what I had typed there? I have to juggle back and forth between undo and redo to see what I typed myself, and retype it myself! That's really... Worse Than Failure on Blogger's part.

With all that frustration out of me, what I wanted to say was, I need a new editor to create my blog posts or I think I'll stop blogging from the mere frustration of dealing with this. Don't worry, I don't think the situation is so bad I won't be able to get any editor to do the job. :)

First, I remembered Microsoft Word itself has a 'Post to Blogger' option, so I tried it. Well, what can I say? The HTML it created was, to put it bluntly, horrible! I'd have been somewhat ok with that if not for the next fact: when I clicked publish to blogger (or something similar), it told me my username and password would be sent in plaintext and anyone can read them. What? This huge program doesn't have a small place for incuding some SSL agent to do encrypted transmissions? I sure ain't giving my Google username and password in the wild like that.

There's also a Blogger for Word add-in to Word that probably handles things more securely, but it's development has been discontinued by Google, and what they give for download doesn't work for me in Word 2007.

Thinking there should be some solution for it, I searched throughout the Internets, only ending up reading things like this which told me some things about Blogger's WYSIWIG editor worked. Not really what I was looking for, but I learnt something. :)

So, the option I'm looking at currently is, creating the posts in the Kompozer or some similar editor, copying the resulting HTML here and posting. Quite a lot of work for such a simple task, but it seems there's no other option. Also, Kompozer doesn't seem to have easy buttons for things such as blockquotes, etc. like Blogger's interface, which makes things a bit more difficult. But in a few days' time, I think I'll be ok with anything to get off this annoying editor.

So, kind reader, if thou knowest of any editor which can my life more pleasant, kindly bestow thy blessings on poor me and reveal its name. I shall be indebted a lot to thou. Thanks. :)

Finding the next palindrome given a number

I recently was looking for websites similar to Project Euler, and came across SPOJ - the Sphere Online Judge. It gives us some problems, then asks us to submit a solution, which it will evaluate and tell if we are worth our salt as programmers ;)
More details here.

There, I came across this problem which looked quite interesting. Basically, the challenge is, given a number n, we've got to find the palindromic number which comes after this.
Some definitions:
Palindromic number: A number that reads the same either way, like 12421, 57375, 8448, 146641, etc.
"comes after this": the palindrome number must be greater than the given number - given 12321, we must find the next palindrome and not return 12321 itself as the answer.

Ok, with those made clear, let's dive into the problem.

On first sight, it seems simple enough: iterate from n+1 checking if each number is a palindrome. Stop when you find a palindrome.
Unfortunately, that strategy is too slow for our purposes - SPOJ clearly states the inputs can be very huge, in which case this brute force would probably not be able to complete it within the given 9 seconds.

Anyway, we are programmers, and must seek more efficient ways when they exist. Here, it does seem there must be a way to find the next palindrome given a number. What would it be?

My first thought was, simply mirror the number around its centre. Then, we'd surely end up with a palindromic number.
What I mean is, given a number 16310, mirror the first half values across the central '3' to give 16361. If the number has an even number of digits, just mirror it about the centre of the number, like 3628 to 3663.

That strategy works as long as the resulting 'mirror-imaged' value is greater than the original number. What if it results in a number less than (or equal to) the original? Say, for 41258, it would give 41214, which is less than the original number. Or 12321, which would give 12321 itself, which is equal to the original number.

So my next strategy was, if simple mirror-imaging fails, increment the middle digit and then do a mirror image. So, 41258 would become 41314. 12321 would be 12421.

But again, there's a problem with this approach. What if the number had even number of digits? There is no middle digit to increment. Let's say the number was 4265. It's simple to see that, instead of the middle digit, if we increment the digit to the left of the middle (2 here), and do the mirror image, we'll have the palindrome we want: 4334 in this case.

So far, so good.

Now, onto a big issue: 9. Yes, the digit nine. We saw that when the simple mirroring fails, we increment the middle (or left to middle) digit. Now, what do we get when we increment 9? 10. Oops! We can't put a 10 where 9 was. Want proof? Try 41968. Simple mirroring would give 41914, no luck there. Incrementing the 9 to 10 would give 411014, not a palindrome even. And also, it's surely false that there's no palindrome between 41,968 and 411,014 (that's between forty one thousand and four hundred and eleven thousand).

So, what do we do? Luckily, something we learnt in elementary school - carrying over - seems to help here too. Wherever the 10 occurred, keep the 0 there itself, carry over the 1 to the previous digit. So here, 41968 would become 42068 which on applying mirroring would give 42024.

Here too, there's a caveat: consider the extreme cases: 99999 would give (with repeated carryover) 1000001, and 9999 would give 100001. In both cases there's an extra 0 hanging in there. So far I've not been able to generalize it, and have been keeping the case of all digits being 9 a special case only. In this special case, I do the usual procedure, then remove one of the 0's from the resulting number. Ugly, but works. :)

EDIT: Turns out if I finish the increment and carrying over parts fully, then mirror image the number according to how many digits it now has, the 9999 cases take care of themselves with the original algo itself - no 'special cases' needed. :)

So, I believe this is the complete algorithm to find the next palindrome given a number. I have not thought through the steps very carefully, so if you see any flaws, kindly point them out...

I'm trying to code this thing in the Lisp programming language, so I'm taking baby steps towards the solution. As of now, I'm yet to implement the carrying over for 9 part alone. And I don't have any idea how complex that is going to be.

Update: I finished coding this in Lisp, but lost the code somewhere. I coded it again in Python now, which is available here. I've put in a lot of comments so as to make it somewhat easily understandable. Hope this helps the doubting Thomases believe. :)

By the way, my GATE solutions blog now has full feed access, which means you can read it fully without leaving the comfort of your RSS reader.

Happy coding :)

Back to blogging

Yeow... It's been quite a while since I blogged here. I've been doing somewhat better in my other blog about GATE question papers' solutions.
The reason I've not been so active here is, unlike there, here I don't have anything specific to say.. I was just bloggin whenever I felt I had free time, and also had something technically interesting to write about.
These recent days, I had convinced myself that I was busy, couldn't afford time for blogging, didn't have anything worthy enough to blog about, etc. It's crazy to what extent you can deceive yourself, given this is possibly the most vetti (translated: being without any work) period I have ever had... :)
Meanwhile, Vijay had a look at my blog and was upset that it was fully technical. He recommended I write something 'not-so-technical' and more like a blog. And that seemed like a good idea too, as that would (hopefully) be much easier to do than to analyze and write a technical one...
But what non-technical topic do I know anything about?
I'm a closet nerd, and hate small talk. I might do it in RL for 'social' reasons (gee, do I hate that word!), but surely not in my blog. This is my space, and shall remain so.
Vijay himself came to the rescue again - 'you think a lot about spiritual and philosophical issues right, why not write articles about that?' he asked. For then, I pointed him to my pseudo home page: http://sundaryourfriend.googlepages.com, but I knew it was heavily outdated and incomplete, and the content wasn't all that mature either. My views and ideas have changed a lot in the mean time (hopefully in a positive gradient), and I've (again hopefully) matured a lot.
So, the conclusion of all this rant is, this is probably going to be the platform for my spiritual or philosophical posts too (unless I decide to start a new blog for it - in which case, I'll surely tell you).
Also, don't get daunted by those two words - By spiritual, I mean things that can improve your life, and by philosophical, I just mean things that I think through deeply.. I'll keep the articles as interesting as Sundar-ly possible. ;)
Finally, I promise you this will be the only nearly-contentless post in my blog (at least for some time), and I'll post something worthwhile as soon as possible... :)