Cat Login Detection

Glen Connolly — Mon, 20 Jul 2020 08:33:33 +0000

I was taking a quick break from work last week when my cat predictably took up napping position on my keyboard. When I looked at the monitor I noticed she had tried to login, and a question dawned on me:
In an age where we use machine learning to detect changes in the inflection in a voice and process hundreds of thousandths of images in seconds, why do we not tell the user that their cat is trying to login to the application they're using and impersonate them?

OK maybe that's not what the cat is doing, but either way it seemed like a great opportunity for an easter egg.

Maybe not the smartest detection setup, but assuming the user is not using software to allow for non-blocking key input detection, I decided counting the characters provided and searching for a character which was entered more than 'X' amount of times would suffice. The aim here was to detect whether a cat is sitting on the keyboard, so sophistication was never a priority here.

private function catInputDetected($s)
{
        return max(array_count_values(str_split($s))) > self::CAT_THRESHOLD;
}

And can you guess what self::CAT_THRESHOLD is?

const CAT_THRESHOLD = 9; //9 Lives

All that was left was to run this check against the username and password, and inform the user that their cat has no boundaries.

if($this->catInputDetected($username) || $this->catInputDetected($password))
{
    throw new \LengthException(
        "
          It would appear your cat has attempted to log in. 
          Please remove your cat from the workspace and try again.
        "
        );
}

Thanks for reading!

Solving the Fibonacci Sequence

Glen Connolly — Wed, 08 Jul 2020 20:16:32 +0000

I started Jon Calhoun's Algorithms With Go course this week, and I have to say it's very enjoyable. I don't know whether it's the course content or getting my hands dirty writing Go Code but it really is a great course.

Anyhoo - One of the algorithms included in the course is the calculation of the Fibonacci sequence.

The Fibonacci sequence is defined as

F(n) = F(n-1) + F(n-2)

I wrote the following solution (here's one I made earlier), but it's bothering me because I feel like it could be written in even less lines of code. Anyone care to try?
I'm not expecting Go, feel free to write it in any language you see fit, I'm just curious how compact the solution to a challenge like this can be. What better community to ask than the dev.to community?

func Fibonacci(n int) int {
    if n < 1 {
        return 0
    }
    if n < 3 {
        return 1
    }
    return Fibonacci(n-1) + Fibonacci(n-2)
}

Forem: Glen Connolly

Cat Login Detection

Solving the Fibonacci Sequence