Good Morning world.  I’ve been rather absent of late, but in order to prove my usefulness I am going to post pictures of the berries I picked this morning.
 It is the growing season and as a lover of canning and gardening I’ve found myself caught between the want to focus more heavily on programming, or canning the entire valley’s produce.  I’ve settled for a little bit of both.  This morning I spent the better part of 3 hours picking berries with my mother and niece Kate.  It was grand weather and the air was drenched with the scent of sun-baked blackberries.  I’ve got a bit of a sunburn but the trade-off was definitely worth it.  

Now that I’ve finished discussing my little bits of canning and berries, I’ll get back to the more important stuff.  My current programming problem.  I’ll be going over the whole thing in detail over the next couple of entries, but for now I’ll give you a quick run down of what the problem is.

It starts off with a DNA sequence.  You’re given two different DNA sequences and a set of identified strands and sub-strands of DNA.  You’re then asked to write some code that will be able to go through the list and find where the DNA strand starts in the sequence.  Then you you know how many times that identified DNA strand shows up in the sequence.  You’re also writing two different functions to solve step one.  One function is iterative, and the other must be recursive (when a function will call itself in order get the needed results).  That’s step one.  

In step two you create a list of all the points where the strand shows up in the sequence.  In step three it becomes a little more complicated.  Step three involves the mutated DNA strand.  At this point you have to divide up the strands so that you can provide a list of the different alterations that could occur.  For example, a DNA strand that was “ATG” has mutated.  It could be “ACG” or “AAG” or “AGG”.  To allow for the mutation, you must allow for that middle spot to be blank.   The limit to this problem is that there is only one mutated piece allowed per identified DNA strand.  

I am to finish part four of this problem today.  I’m still wrapping my head around what it’s asking for.  I’ll let you know what I find out later.