So, we got to talking about it over dinner with
Edsger Dijkstra was a Dutch computer scientist who passed away in 2002. The contribution that makes his name a household word among network geeks is Dijkstra's algorithm. There are other methods for computing the shortest path through a network, but Dijkstra's algorithm is just about the most efficient there is. So efficient that pretty much every network routing protocol sophisticated enough to do more than merely count hops uses Dijkstra (e.g. OSPF, and ATM's PNNI to name two).
I've always wondered wondered how the guts of Dijkstra's algorithm actually worked. Seriously, how could I resist? I spent a chunk of last night and a couple hours this morning banging out first a Perl script that used Dijkstra to generate shortest-path routes through a network of nodes, and then twisting it to meet the particular requirements of this kinship mapping assignment. This page (Comp150PPP Assignment 2) was particularly helpful.
The full-on kinship mapping version is something of a train wreck (if I were writing it for production and not as a teaching aide for Asha I'd use a SQL database and not a mish-mash of text files and arrays, but the class is pretty basic, so nothing too complicated). If you'd like a real April fool's gag, you can examine what I loosely refer to as my coding style: the basic Dijkstra program, input file, and output.
Oh, and we made two runs to the dump and cut down last year's ornamental grasses here. And then it rained.
Joie de geek or Je ne sais dork - you be the judge.