Captain Bligh Debugs Dutch Navigation

It's the little things that add up - what if bugzilla had existed back then. Think Bligh would have made an entry?

In the passage to the Cape of Good Hope, there occurred nothing worth remark. I cannot however forbear noticing the Dutch manner of navigating. They steer by true compass, or rather endeavour so to do, by means of a small moveable central card, which they set to the meridian : and whenever they discover the variation has altered 2.5 degrees, since the last adjustment, they again correct  the central card. This is a steering within a quarter of a point, without aiming at greater exactness. The officer of the watch likewise corrects the course for lee-way, by his own judgement, before it is marked down in the log board. They have no log : I was told that the company do not allow it. Their manner of computing their run, is by means of a measured distance of 40 feet, along the ships side : they take notice of any remarkable patch of froth, when it is abreast the foremost end of the measured distance, and count half-seconds til the mark of froth is abreast the after end. With the number of half seconds thus obtained, they divide the number 48, taking the product for the rate of sailing in geographical miles in one hour, or the number of dutch miles in four hours.

     It is not unusual to make any allowance to the sun's declination, on account of being on a different meridian from that for which the tables are calculated : they in general, compute witht he numbers just as they are found in the table. From all this, it is not difficult to conceive the reason why the Dutch are frequently above ten degrees out in their reckoning. Their passages likewise are considerably lengthened, by not carrying a sufficient quantity of sail.

Yuck! Which side, the Engs or the Dutch do you reckon went on to become a world power and tame the Deutsch?

Quickly Reverse a File in NEdit

You need this done in 10 seconds, what do you do?

CTRL-A to select all.
ALT-R to filter selection.
type

tac '-'

into the dialog and hit ENTER. And you're done :)

Apple's Version of abort/retry/fail

MXNicknameWizard.Nickname.FlaggedError_explanation

Reagan's Soviet Jokes

In the USSR, it takes 10 years to get a car and you have to pay in advance and only 1 in 7 families have autos. One guy gets his $ together and goes to the place to order one and the guy says okay, come back in 10 years to pick up your car. The guy says "Morning or afternoon?". The guy behind the counter says, "10 years from now what difference does it make?" The buyer says, "The plumber's coming in the morning."

An American and a Russian are arguing about which system is better. The A says I have great freedom - I can walk into the Oval O and pound the desk and say, Mr. President I don't like the way you're running this country. The Russian says I can do that. The American is stunned. You can?
Yes, I can walk into the Kremlin, into the General Secretary's office, pound the desk and say, "Mr. G. Secretary, I don't like the way Reagan's running his country."

In the USSR, only 1 in 7 families own automobiles and most of them are owned by bureaucrats - the government issues them autos. At one point, they decide on a zero tolerance policy towards speeding. Anyone, regardless of rank, would get a ticket for speeding. One day, Gorbachev is late for his meeting, he tells his driver, you get in the back, I'll drive today. The pass 2 motorcycle cops and one of them chases him. Ten minutes later, he's back and his buddy says "Did you give him a t?" "No, too important." "What? You're supposed to give anyone speeding a ticket." "I know, but this guy was too important." "Really? Who was it?" I couldn't recognize him, but his driver was Gorbachev.

A guy loses his parrot and he reports it to the KGB. The KGB says, "Well, you lost ya parrot, why botha us? Why not go to your local police department?". Thy guy says, "I just want you to know that I don't agree with a single thing my parrot says."

Three dogs - American, Polish and Russian are talking about which country is the best. The A dog says "In our place, you bark long enough and sure enough, someone will give you a piece of meat." The Polish dog says, "What's 'meat'?" Then the R dog says, "What's 'bark'?"

A soldier calls out to a man. The man doesn't stop. The soldier shoots him. His fellow soldier says, "what did you do that for?" "Curfew." "But it's not curfew yet." "True, but that guy's a friend of mine. I know where he he lives and he wouldn't have made it."

Moonwalking with Einstein : Josh Foer

Disappointing - 90% fluff. The non fluff :

Sigmund Freud found from his research that older memories seem to the rememberer as if described by an observer through a camera whereas the newer memories are more first-person-ish.

The Ad Herrenium is a must read.

If you want to feel like life is passing you by very fast, then make it monotonous. If you want to feel like time is passing slowly, then create anchors - memories that you can associate with moments in time - make your life interesting.

Why You Should Master Python builtins - tuple, list, etc..

 David Beazley - supermensch..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyDLAutA88s

Bonus : you'll find out why you should NOT eat at O'Hare or Subway.

Screwed by Ophtotech : Thank You David Guyer

Now I've seen it - a stock I'm holding drops in value 85% overnight. $400 goes poof.

Steve Skiena Algorithm Complexity

n! > 2^n > n^3 > n^2 > nlogn > n > logn > 1

1 : Adding 2 numbers
log(n) :
n : sweeping through an array of elements
n*log(n) : Heap sort
n^2 : Bubble sort
n^3 : Matrix multiplication
2^n : enumerating all subsets of a given set
n! : enumerating all permutations (Eg. perfect solution to travelling salesman problem)

https://youtu.be/ZJfRrGlMXp4?list=PLOtl7M3yp-DV69F32zdK7YJcNXpTunF2b

Cute Perl One Liner

Just remember there's more than one way to do it and I'm not the smartest guy around..

Turn

1
1
1
1
1

into

1
2
3
4
5

That doesn't sound hard. But, what if you have 10 seconds to turn

ssd1
ssd1
ssd1
ssd1
ssd1

into .. well, you know..

Easy : Use NEdit (the best text editor) and select the column of 1's and then pipe through (ALT-r)

perl -p -e 's/./$./;'

Yes, $. (dollar period) means current input line number.

Turn a column of the same number into a sequence of uniformly increasing numbers using perl..

Stephen Jungels der Transcode Meister

What a work of art! What an enabler! apt-cyg Ladies and Gs..

The Keyboard Shortcuts of Benjamin Franklin

Some may think these trifling matters not worth minding or relating; but when they consider that tho' dust blown into the eyes of a single person, or into a single shop on a windy day, is but of small importance, yet the great number of the instances in a populous city, and its frequent repetitions give it weight and consequence, perhaps they will not censure very severely those who bestow some attention to affairs of this seemingly low nature. Human felicity is produced not so much by great pieces of good fortune that seldom happen, as by little advantages that occur every day. Thus, if you teach a poor young man to shave himself, and keep his razor in order, you may contribute more to the happiness of his life than in giving him a thousand guineas. The money may be soon spent, the regret only remaining of having foolishly consumed it; but in the other case, he escapes the frequent vexation of waiting for barbers, and of their sometimes dirty fingers, offensive breaths, and dull razors; he shaves when most convenient to him, and enjoys daily the pleasure of its being done with a good instrument. With these sentiments I have hazarded the few preceding pages, hoping they may afford hints which some time or other may be useful to a city I love, having lived many years in it very happily, and perhaps to some of our towns in America.

Alfred North Whitehead (Eng. Mathematiker) : Mankind's progress is measured by the number of things we can do without thinking. Love it! That's what keyboard shortcuts are all about babe!

Congratulations IIT Kanpur

NTNX : Enough Said

Das Ist MIT At Its Best

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQ5jsbhAv_M#t=32.46

Love a subject. Transfer that love of the subject to your audience.

A Tasty Morsel

From Prof. Tom Leighton

Prove that n^3 + 3n^2 + 2n is dividible by 3.

Ans : It's n^3 - n + 3( n^2 + n). And n^3 - n is (n-1)n(n+1) and one out of every 3 #'s is div by 3. QED

Class taught by a billionaire with a $1 salary.

What :

Proofs - what they are, good and bad ones. Why proofs? You want to be able to prove your software won't do something bad.
Induction, strong induction, invariants - very useful for the "proving" related to undesired states.
GCD of 2 numbers is a linear combination of the numbers. Euclid's theorem and lemma : GCD(a,b) = GCD( rem(b,a), a) -- very cute one.

Lessons from Alessio Rastani (How to Make Money in Stocks)

Use the Market Sentiment Index (% of stocks trading above their 50 day MA) :

$SPXA50R -- if below 25, oversold.

$BPSPX -- tells you when to sell..

No More Youtube Ads

Kunal of Udacity has figured out how to play YouTube videos without having to sit through painful ads. How?

Know the ID of the YouTube video (Jeez, YT is a word now - if you type Youtube, without the T uppercase, spellchecker frowns!).

For example : take this video of Anton Kriel telling "the truth about trading" :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h3lByx59ns

You never paid any attention to the URL before because your finding and playing was GUI based. For now, this video doesn't come with ads. But, what if it did and you didn't want to watch the ads.

Get the ID - in this case, 9h3lByx59ns.

Construct this URL and load it and you're done :

https://www.youtube.com/embed/9h3lByx59ns

You can get smart by adding stuff like "?autoplay=1&html5=1" and stuff like that :)

Next step - can you define a keyboard shortcut for Chrome so that you can do something to load the video (CTRL-SHIFT-LMB maybe?) this way? Wouldn't that be nicer than having the cut and paste text :) ?

English Names - Which One's Missing?

Charity
Verity
Chastity
Felicity
Simplicity
Calamity

Not Without Lumosity

Maybe I'm selling myself short, but, I keep telling people, it's after I started playing Penguin Pursuit that I noticed myself seeing around corners and solving problems like this one easily.

This one took me just seconds ..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCpdB0SleCA

Oops I Set Outlook to Use Notepad to Open that File and It Displays the Whole File on One Line

Who hasn't done that before?

So, you want to change the Application associated with that file type.

My experience with the Windows 10 Settings utility wasn't good. So, here's what I recommend :

1. Launch the Settings utility.
2. In the Find a Setting field, put in Control Panel and hit Enter.
3. Control Panel launches, but has jumped the gun, so you have to use the navigation bar on top to go back to Control Panel from "All Control Panel Settings" (if you're dumb like me :)
4. Now, click on Programs
5. Now, click on Default Programs
6. Then, click on "Associate a file type or protocol with a program" -- can take a few seconds to load
7. Scroll down till you find your extension, select it and then click the Change Program button.

Battle Royal Font

Louise Sandhaus tells us ... it's from George Nesbit's outfit Intellecta Design : Octagon French from the 1830's.

Howto : Open a Folder in Windows Explorer (File Explorer) from cygwin command line

Use cygstart

Zeeshan Usmani : The Diff Between a Museum and a Warehouse

Meet der Mensch who's up all night long learning something new on Coursera. That's right - he's done 70+ Coursera courses in the last 3 years.

Your success is based on what you decide not to do. If you collect all the art in the world and put it in a room, that's a warehouse. Whereas, if you decide to take out some of it and leave only what you think makes the grade, that room becomes a museum. Wah wah.

What? M$ Magic - Or is it Chrome?

Suddenly this old piece of c Precision is working good after the recent Win update. What happened?

Hurrah for Satya! Finally, Any Colour Highlighting!!!! Yay!

Paint can't do it. Gimp can't do it.
Snipping tool can't do it. Screw it!
Powerpoint can!!

We'd like to think it's because of getting an Indian the top job, but in our hearts, we know it's in spite of an Indian in the top job :)

Just kidding boys. Enjoy the better docs. Convey ideas to your team in a jiffy.
Why accessorize when you can iconize?

Congratulations Gregory David Roberts

Okay, you're an idiot for what you put yourself through because you never learnt how to say no, but.. it's been a while since one person taught me so many new words. Maybe shame on me for knot nowing some of them..

suborn : bribe or otherwise influence someone to commit an unlawful act such as perjury

defile : a steep-sided, narrow gorge or passage (originally one requiring troops to march in single file).

architrave : the molded frame around a doorway or window

curlicue : a decorative curl or twist in calligraphy or in the design of an object

quoin : an external angle of a wall or building

sibilant : (of a speech sound) sounded with a hissing effect, for example s, sh.

condolent : feeling or expressing sorrow

ontology : the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being

apodictic : clearly established or beyond dispute

gibbous : convex or protuberant

rictal : relating to the gap or cleft of an open mouth or beak

supernatant : denoting the liquid lying above a solid residue after crystallization, precipitation, centrifugation, or other process.

sybaritic : fond of sensuous luxury or pleasure; self-indulgent

syzgygy : a conjunction or opposition, especially of the moon with the sun.

faronade :

vicinal : neighboring; adjacent

The World Class Brain : Simon Ramo

Use your brain - and keep sharpening it. It doesn't get better than this..

Got 2 PhD's by the age of 23. Accumulated 25 patents before his 30th birthday. Did aerospace stuff and also developed GE's electron microscope.

Man, what would I not give... and he lived to be 103 too.. The father of the ICBM. Got to work with John von Neumann as well..

Aus Heute's Journal : Yona Goldrich

After escaping the holocaust at age 14 and arriving in America by way of the Hungarian forest and Israel, der Mensch hoped to go to MIT, but had to settle work in Los Angeles due to poor English skills (lesson : learn the lingo - you don't get very far if you can't speak the language that's in vogue).

There he built a real e empire.

"I don't tell you if you do a good job - because that's what I hired you for. I only tell you if you do a bad job."

"I'd rather not be a deal that would make me money than be in a deal that will lose me money."

"Don't tell me how much this deal will make me. Tell me how much I can lose."

Magic : How Does Codecademy Provide a Linux Terminal In a Web Browser

Here's a starting point.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19561188/simulating-linux-terminal-in-browser

As someone once plagiarized from me, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Except When One Really Needs It

Shame on you Sling. I thought I could watch the game sitting down. In the end, had to head back to the gym to watch it standing on a treadmill and posing like a DirecTV dish. *ds!

grep print blank line after each file group

 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8273636/add-blank-line-after-every-result-in-grep

Perl solution :

grep blah files | perl -F: -ap -e 'print "\n" if $f ne $F[0]; $f = $F[0];' 

And you're done.

-F : specify the character to be used for the split (space by default)

-a : autosplit into @F

Helper Perl nand2tetris

Go from

Register( in=in, load=a, out=outA );
Register( in=in, load=a, out=outA );
Register( in=in, load=a, out=outA );
Register( in=in, load=a, out=outA );

Register( in=in, load=a, out=outA );
Register( in=in, load=a, out=outA );
Register( in=in, load=a, out=outA );
Register( in=in, load=a, out=outA );

to

Register( in=in, load=a, out=outA );

Register( in=in, load=b, out=outB );

Register( in=in, load=c, out=outC );

Register( in=in, load=d, out=outD );

Register( in=in, load=e, out=outE );

Register( in=in, load=f, out=outF );

Register( in=in, load=g, out=outG );

Register( in=in, load=h, out=outH );

easily (helps with the RAM8 example). Yes, in this case, it's faster to type manually :) But then, why are you a techie :) ?

perl -p -e 'BEGIN{$i=0} s/(=(?:out)?)(a)/sprintf("$1%c",ord($2)+$i )/gei and $i++;' 

Excel With Business : Ten Thumbs Down!

Man - this is the ultimate low-budget production.

Totally worth five bucks, not worth a cent over 10. Fooled me once for $80. Shame on you.

Beautiful Adorable China

We know they make cheap stuff you still have to pay for. But, how about this one? I'd love to meet the genius kids that did this. I use this! I tried to donate and Paypal says, sorry, Chinese accounts can only send, not receive.

http://hostmath.com/

The Biological Weapons of Kevin Esvelt

Mendelian genetics - equal opportunity heredity

CRISPR :

Kevin Esvelt :

Stanford d.School : Design Process Guidelines

Show, Don't Tell

Focus on Human Values

Craft Clarity

Embrace Experimentation

Be Mindful of Process

Bias Towards Action

Radical Collaboration

http://dschool.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/BootcampBootleg2010v2SLIM.pdf

A Must Watch : Patrick Winston

Question is, why does he look so young in this one and so old in the AI lectures?

https://vimeo.com/101543862

Logger Using Google Cardboard and Remote Keyboard

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/remote-keyboard-use-your-computer-keyboard-to-type-on-your-android-phone-via-wi-fi/

Why use a regular keyboard to type into your phone? Coz it's a lot faster.

You have to make work work. And one of the things you need to do, as a techie, is keeping track of what you learn - best practices, core concepts, etc.. You need to put them in a doc you can take with you. Most employers will not let you take the files you build up on your work computer even if those files are of a personal nature.

So, how do you carry a computer in your pocket that you can type into?

Use your work computer as the keyboard, to type into your a file on your phone that you're viewing using Google glass.

That's how..

When someone asks you, say you're watching a relaxing video to de-stress.

Pushy Pays Off

Hmmm... they the picked the Filipinos because Americans couldn't stand the Indian accent. Next thing I know, after I've been on the phone with the tech support guy and trying to understand why I need to wait 24 to 48 hours, I ask, are you located in India or the US (I really thought he was Indian) - and he answers - Phillipines.

Long story short - all I could get out of him was, we need to wait for tap activation - technician needs to come out to your location. BS. I'm already talking to twc.com with my modem. It's pushed 53 minutes! Finally, gets to his supervisor, Hailey who solves it in about 5 minutes - reboots the modem, activates it, etc.. Total call time 1 hr 3 min!!

At that point, it's my newer (Precision) Dell that's directly on the modem. I don't want to complicate things. Anyhow, after that calls done, I put the ethernet cable into the router and try to get onto the the internet through WiFi. Only, *this* PC can't do it. It had no problem through the ethernet, but WiFi, good luck - this after I've successfully used WiFi in tonnes of other places. Why me?

So, I want to make sure it's not the router. I get my phone on there, and my older PC - on which I'm typing this (all laptops, BTW :) - whoever sees a desktop anymore:)?) So, it *is* the PC. A huge thank you to the geniuses at Redmond and Austin who make the crappy stuff that lets Apple ads poke fun at them.

Problem : One or more network protocols are missing on this computer.

Side note : Occasionally, I see the Skype popus announcing people coming online. Hmm..

What did I do? I put the etheret back - this time between the router and the PC and internet access worked. And then, I took the cable out - and internet access worked :) Go figure :)

Howto : Excel Online (Onedrive) - Creating a Link to "Place in This Document"

You've noticed that Excel Online is noticeably harder to use :)

To accomplish this in the paid version, when you wanted to insert a link to a sheet, the you used the menu to pick the sheet you wanted to link to..

Now what do you do?

Answer : you have to specify the sheet AND a cell. So, if all you care about is going to a particular Sheet (call it Target). Then, you have to put in (without the quotes, of course) "Targets!A1" .

How do I know this? I uploaded a file created with the paid version and looked at it.

Why would you want to do this? It's an easy way to build a "dashboard" Imagine all your controls on the Tesla or Apple-car spread out in one line at the bottom of the control-panel. Yuck. Yet, that's exactly how M$ serves them. *ds of Redmond!!

Perl One Liner Quickly Spit Out Decimal from Binary

perl -e 'print unpack("N", pack("B32", substr( "0"x32 . "YOUR_NUM_HERE", -32 ))),"\n";'

Arul's code wasn't as helpful as Stack Overflow..

Making the long YOUR NUMs readable :

perl -e 'print unpack("N", pack("B32", substr( "0"x32 . "0110" . "1010" . "1100", -32 ))),"\n";'

Maksimovic Feels Rakitic's Pain

This Coursera business must take its toll on our big name professors... I've seen Prof. Maksimovic grow old before my very eyes..

Intel Insight : What Makes 7 nm FinFET so Hard

When feature sizes are this small, it's simply impossible to produce a mask that is free from errors. We go through 10 masks (each costing a few 10's of 1000's of $) to get one with few enough errors that it can be fixed through Atomic Force Microscopy.

Congratulations Jan. Virtuix Bucket-Fill Picks Up the Pace

Hmmm... nice - the last couple days look like they're getting about 50k per day or more.. Last time I took the trouble to calculate, it was a measly $20k/day. Still a ways to go..

I Wish : Machine Learning

Can you come up with a web-based app that can quiz you for a few minutes and then tell you how long it will take for you to achieve a certain level of proficiency in a target area? That would be cool - and it would be nice if they also had the resources you would have to plow through to get there...

Anyone Not Love Github?

What a super experience? I decide it's no point with the paid plan... I'll never convince my boss to use it, etc. Let me save my $7 a month, and, login, billing, change plan, downgrade and .. immediately - you will be refunded x for this billing period. .... Super! Great job Linus.

M$ Edge Bests Google Chrome Again

Just something about the free thing - you get what you pay for. Sure, Google Chrome works 99.99% of the time, but, Paychex just now bombed on it and M$ edge delivered. Go figure.

Still, AAPL and AMZN are not GOOG. GOOG gives the world good (I hope) things for free. AAPL has only now caught on..

Things You Can Do with Excel that You Can't Do with Google Sheets

https://www.quora.com/What-cant-I-do-with-Google-Sheet-that-I-can-do-with-Microsoft-Excel is a good starting point.

My list :

Format as table is big. Why the hell can GOOG provide that? There's a reason smart people avoid lists and go for tables. Check it out : Pg 42 of Lauren Starkey's masterpiece.

Shame On You Cal Newport

Sad that an MIT product would put out a time-waster like this.

Like anything, it's not ALL bad - there is some good in it. Only, like most stuff that comes out these days, it can be condensed into about 2 pages.  (Deep Work : Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)

Mate, why the hell do you write it like the body of a paper without the abstract? You're giving us motivation and wasting 200 pages on it. Start the book with something like :

"... The author's hope is that the reader, after digesting this material, see that it is in his best interest to suspend his Facebook and Twitter accounts, sign out of email accounts after 5:30 PM, stick to a rigorous sleep, diet and exercise regimen, and organize his schedule to allow for complete free-days to focus on vital projects. The sections on accessing empowering states to boost concentration, and the role self-awareness plays in managing one's emotional state are also crucial to internalize."

Of course, Mr. Newport is targeting 200 publications and 20 books before his 30th birthday, so the stuff I mentioned at the end of my preferred intro will (maybe) show up a few years later. Think about it man!! Don't you know people with low self-esteem have trouble concentrating? If your life is not in order, you will be distracted! If you have problem relationships, they will plague your mind! Do you see great work coming out of the trailer parks? Why not? It isn't like they don't have the time! Think about it - do some HARD WORK and THEN publish for EVERYONE! Not the R1 tenure-track community!!

Bottom line - there's a lot of basic stuff missing - people with high self-esteem and high energy-level concentrate better. Even Magnus Carlsen knows he needs to exercise regularly. And food? How about a basic list of OK snacks and OK meals and NOT OK stuff? Keep it simple you !@#$!@#$. Is it any surprise that MIT guys haven't accomplished anything near the Stanford grads in the last 20 years? That's because all they're trained it to push the boundaries of publishing. Give the lay people something they can use mensch! If Albert Lin knew this, he wouldn't have white hair before his 25th birthday.

One thing I learnt from Dan Arieli (The Upside of Irrationality) is - if you're doing something you enjoy, take breaks. If you're doing something you need to plough through, plough through! Don't take breaks. The rationale? Humans are very good at adapting. If it's something you like - you'll adapt - and the pleasure will not be noticeable anymore and you'll want to up the intensity. Why do people drink more or overdose (okay, that's naive I know). So, if you're taking a shower and you like the warm water hitting your back, stop! Enough! If you're working on taxes - GET IT DONE!! The point? When it comes to email - my brilliant insight is to always leave one email unchecked. You open your mail tool and see a bunch of new emails - decide right away which one you're going to save for checking later. Check the others and then shut the tool down. That's what I'm going to do from now on.

Enough sliming of the bad Mr. Calport :) Now, what DID I get out his airport trash :

The chain method of Jerry Seinfeld. BIG ONE - how to use it - incorporate it into your dashboard - I keep an excel spreadsheet (Google sheets sucks btw - why can't they provide the same features M$ does??!!) open all the time where I have separate sheets for accomplishments, targets, learning, etc. Now, I'll be putting in a new one - that's a running calendar and, I'll use that one to build a chain. Looks like the calendar thing is a solved problem - so that's good - we'll see :)

Simply : try to get rid of email, Facebook, Twitter, IM. Ensure you do come into contact with people regularly - as that gives your thinking the jolts it needs. Minimum time allocation for deep work of significance is one day. Also - learning to memorize a deck of cards in 5 minutes is a big deal - it will take you to the next level in concentration. [[I can't say for sure what exactly I got out of memorizing the Rubik-cube solution - but I'm none the worse for knowing it. I tell people I noticed my stress level was lower after I learnt juggling. (The rationale is that you become more comfortable with having a lot of things going on because you learn to let something go to deal with something else). Likewise, I've said that my Lumosity lifetime-subscription has more than paid for itself because, at the very least, getting better at something boosts your self-esteem and confidence and that, by itself gives you better cognitive ability and productivity that you can take to your day job.]]

Donald Knuth : 

I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.

Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study.

____

The bimodal philosophy believes that deep work can produce extreme productivity, but only if the subject dedicates enough time to such endeavors to reach maximum cognitive intensity - the state in which real breakthroughs occur. This is why the minimum unit of time for deep work in this philosophy tends to be at least one full day. To put aside a few hours in the morning, for example, is too short to count as a deep work stretch for an adherent of this approach.

-----------

The chain method (as some now call it) soon became a hit among writers and fitness enthusiasts - communities that thrive on the aility to do hard things consistently. For our pruposes, it provides a specific example of ageneral approach to integrating depth into your life : the rhythmic philosophy. This philoosophy argues that the easiest way to conssitently start deep work sessions is to transform them into a simple regular habit. The goal, in other words, is to generate a rhythmm for this work that removes the need for your to invest eergy in deciding if and when you're going to go deep.

---------

The shutdown ritual described earlier leverages this tactic to battle the Zeigarnik effect. While it doesn't force you to explicitly identify a plan for every single task in your task list (a burdensome requirement), it does force you to capture every task in a common list, and then review these tasks before making a plan for the next day. This ritual ensures that no task will be forgotten : Each will be reviewed daily and tackled when the time is appropriate.

--------

Rule #1 taught you how to integrate deep work into your scheule and support it with routines and rituals designed to help you consitently reach the current limit of your concentration ability. Rule #2 will help you significantly improve this limit. The strategies that follow are motivated by the key idea that getting the most out of your deep work habit requires training, and as clarified previously, this training must address two goals : improving your ability to concentrate intewntsely and overcoming your desire for distraction. These strategies cover a variety of approaches from quarantining distraction to mastering a special form of meditationl, that combine to provide a practical road map for your journey from a mind wrecked by constatnt distraction and unfamiliar with concentration, to an instrument that truly does deliver laser-like focus. 

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Memorize a deck of cards :

1. You have to be able to visualize moving through 5 rooms in your house and, in each room, you have to be able to, in your mind, go from one significant object to another - 10 per room. Add 2 objects of your choice to the 50 already compiled.
2. Now (and here's where I wish you could make  lifelike effigy of Andy Grove bear down on Calport and say "You are telling me WHAT to do, when I want you to tell me HOW to do it.") (the hard part) you have to readily have 52 people or things associated with the different cards of the deck - say Trump for the King of Diamonds - make up your own meanings. Say Marilyn M for the 1 of D, you get the idea.
3. Then, looking at the deck of walk through your house and put a person with each object.

And you're done :)

Easy, right? Scumbag Calport!

http://www.artofmanliness.com/2012/06/01/how-to-memorize-a-deck-of-cards/

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Congratulations Jan Goetgeluk. Congratulations Virtuix. Ha Ha SeedInvest

The sad thing is people are already pulling money out :(

Last night at 6:30 they were at $3955299.

This morning : $3954498

They were at $3816766 six days ago. 

Which means, the goal of $15 mil will be reached on : Jan's Birthday! Aug 10, 2017!

Shame on Me : Vocore

How come I didn't even know about this?

Move over Eben Upton!

Special Mention : http://www.kroah.com/linux/talks/ols_2005_driver_tutorial/

Another new today : There's such a thing as Perl 6 and rakudo is something that "runs Perl 6". WDTM?

How to Create Flashing Cells in M$ Excel

And have them flash when you open your workbook :

start with excel.tips :

http://excel.tips.net/T002134_Flashing_Cells.html (resource)

had to figure out how to do new cell style

turn on the Developer tab

Click on the Macros button. In the Macro dialog that pops up, one of those you already
have will be selected. No problem, in the Macro name : field, start typing : StartFlash

Now, all all buttons that were available get greyed out and the "Create" button becomes
available. Click it and you go to VBA editing - now, paste Allen's code and ensure you
change "Flashing" that he has in 2 places to whatever you called your style..

then, to paste Allen Wyatt's macros :

google "excel create vba macro"

To make this one start automatically when you open this workbook :

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Run-a-macro-5e855fd2-02d1-45f5-90a3-50e645fe3155#bmrunmacroautomatically (resource)

(summary :)
You go to Visual Basic

Right click "This Worksheet". And add : (or overwrite) (you do need to read the stuff on above link :)

Private Sub Workbook_Open()
    Run "StartFlash"
End Sub

Alexander Elder : MMMM

Mind - know yourself
Method - how do you find trades - do you watch Cramer, use a screener?
Money - how do you size positions, how do you exit trades?
Management - "Show me a trader with good records and I'll show you a good trader."

Man! Dr. Alex Elder is such a PITHY GENIUS. I love hearing this guy speak. So what if he has an accent? It doesn't cost a cent.

Anyway, M4 pretty much tells me I suck. More than 10 years ago, I read Bill O'Neil who said to keep records - keep charts on which you mark where you got in and where you got out so you can learn from your mistakes. Elder adds "and your successes." No excuse there for me - I credit myself with doing my homework. I guess I suck after all.

Like someone answered a dude on Quora who asked about why he didn't get a job after x interviews - the first thing to realize is - it's you... That's a hard truth. What thing about yourself can you enhance today to make yourself more interesting and competitive?

Valeant and S&P's Jeffrey Loo : What a Surprise!

Jeff's been lowering his price target along with the market - who could have seen that one coming.

Best part - he still screams BUY! Kind of like Jim Cramer going on talk shows and telling people to buy Bear Stearns.

Ray Dalio's Treasure Trove

Teenagers should be horse-whipped and made to read these - and Buffet's letters of course :

http://www.bwater.com/Uploads/FileManager/Principles/Bridgewater-Associates-Ray-Dalio-Principles.pdf

And also :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

Understanding the economy :

Productivity growth; Short-term debt cycle; Long-term debt cycle.

Super man!

1. Don't allow debt to rise faster than income.
2. Don't allow income to rise faster than productivity - this one can be used - you should always come across as being capable of contributing more than they're going to pay you :)
3. Do all you can to boost productivity - yes this one also you can use personally - you want to be able to get your work done as fast as you can - and if you run out of work, they have to pay you more because you're contributing more.

I know, I'm doomed to be a working class man :)

What Would Genrich Do?

Here's a contradiction Mr. Altschuler :

You want your pixel to be as sensitive as possible - when it gets electrons, you want it to generate as big of a voltage as possible so you overpower the noise of the readout circuitry as much as possible.

Problem : the more signal voltage you get per electron, the faster you're using up the available range that that node provides the voltage due to headroom limitations. So, you're losing dynamic range.

What's a brother to do? No wonder TI has no use for Joyce anymore.

Informing, Not Bragging

I am a design lead building custom integrated circuits for Apple Inc.

My first Thunderbolt product TPS22980 just ramped to production for the mass market as an A0. It has already sold millions.

The design cycle of my second product as design lead just completed with the largest wafer chip scale package ever designed for production at Texas Instruments. In contains a dc-dc power converter, high voltage and bandwidth power amplifier, and large digital core. It went to production as an A0.

A third product Thunderbolt product TPS22985 with original circuits I designed has ramped to production as an A0.

During four years in the group, three Apple products went to production as an A0, and I was the design lead for two of them. The third product that went to production as an A0 was a simple metal spin.

Can Apple Improve UX?

http://www.wikihow.com/Transfer-Files-to-iPad-from-a-Computer

Stop making Rube Goldberg machines.. Please..

Eric Schmidt's Autobiography : "What I Learnt from the Softbank Jerk"

Quoting from Fortune :

He also talked co-founder Page into relaxing his famously centralized hiring protocol so Arora could staff up more quickly. Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, says Arora's moves signaled the start of a "federating" of Google as it transitioned from a U.S.-centric search engine into a global powerhouse. Google Europe hit $8 billion in revenue in five years, doubling Arora's initial projection and increasing its share of Google's revenue from 25% to nearly 50%.

Aruora also created analytics tools that spat out daily reports on the health of the European business, something the rest of the company eventually adopted. The tools helped Arora spot the 2008 financial crisis early, alerting the mother ship that something was amiss and enabling Google to adjust spending ahead of a slow quarter. That was invaluable, Schmidt says: "After that I decided anything Nikesh wanted to do, I wanted to do as well."

Aha.. what's the moral of the story here?

Inadequate journalism, that's what. If Fortune was really worth reading, they would have a side note tellng us we could go online and see how you can create such reports for yourself. Why not empower people to be more effective? Come on guys..

Find da Windows 10 Win10 WiFi Password for Saved Network

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnohPTdojwk

• On taskbar, right-click on WiFi icon and choose Open Network and Sharing Center
• 
  
• you should see your network. On the right, you'll see a link for "Wireless Network Connnection (name)"
• 
  
• Click the link to get a new window called Wireless Network Connection Status.
• 
  
• Go to the Wireless  Properties button and, in the resulting Window, go to the Security tab and check "Show characters"

After Years and Years, Finally, nedit.wordDelimiters

Multi-year frustration thanks to the *ds to put out Cygwin.

Never could figure out how to get the Xresources to be honoured by the once-great-still-unmatched Nirvana Editor. ~/.Xresources has no effect whatsoever.

All my own fault - the waiting part of it...

See, I had been using an alias in bash just to get around the problem of NEdit using csh for filtering selections through a shell command. And bash is all we have these days on cygwin (why?).

So,

function medit() { /usr/bin/nedit -xrm "nedit.shell: /bin/bash"  "$@" ;}

Has been in my ~/.bashrc for a while now. And I put it there without really thinking about what I was typing - and, today, I see the light and upgrade to 

function medit() { /usr/bin/nedit -xrm "nedit.shell: /bin/bash" -xrm "nedit.wordDelimiters: .,\\\`\'\!@#%^&*()-=+{}[]\":;<>?" "$@" ;}

And it's heaven again. Thank you Fermilab. If high-energy physicists from a once-great institute can't do without a decent text-editor, how sir can you and I?

New Laptop Rites de Passage

1. Install Chrome
2. Install f.lux
3. Install Autohotkey
4. Install EasyWindowDrag_KDE
5. Change properties on taskbar to Auto-Hide :)
6. Install Wizmo (Steve Gibson)
7. Install Gwarble's Notify -- so you can use your other AHK script without it screaming :) ( I use it to get an indication of the CapLock status -- with 2 big monitors at work and a crappy Logitech keyboard, you're never sure...)
8. Yikes, how did I ever forget : Cygwin!

and then you're all set :) .. still need to install JDK, Android S, ...

Art Institutes Fraud

Long live Syd Andrade for blowing the whistle.

Most of the time spent in the class was the students teaching the teacher!! *ds!

They guaranteed him a job and then placed him in an $8/hr job at the local Office Depot!

https://www.wfla.com/news/art-institute-of-tampa-grad-accuses-school-of-fraud/

Art Institute of Tampa graduate Sydney Andrade is preparing his claim package. He says he graduated owing more than $80,000

“If what was actually promised to be the education and what was promised to be my curriculum actually panned out the way they said it would, I would gladly pay for this,” says Andrade, who now lives in Austin, Texas.

Andrade accuses the school of lying about qualified instructors and industry-standard learning tools. He adds this forced him to teach himself much of what he knows through video game art and design YouTube videos. He also tells News Channel 8 the school didn’t deliver on an in-field job placement promise. Andrade claims the school helped him get an $8 per hour job making copies at Office Depot, which doesn’t require a college degree.

Beyond.com Sells Me Excel With Business

A $80 mini MBA and then I'm set to extort big companies for $300 an hour of meaningless twaddle..

To Do's from One Session with the WSJ, Economist and Time

Lithium is hot. All other commodities tanking, but, if you can find a way to buy Li futures, go for it!

And... maybe not - I don't get it - the mag showed a hockey stick, but take a look at LIT and go figure.. :(

----

Just had to go online and find some of the transcripts Michael Spicer cooked up - you know - Bill/Blair phone calls..

----

El Chapo has a fleet of submarines and sent his boys to Alemania to study the craft of tunnel building. Really? What makes the Germans so good at tunnels? Why couldn't he send them to Spain to learn - where they'd already speak the lingo? The numbers make you wonder - this guy has caused the deaths of 70k people. Really? Is he related to you know who?

----

Get "Money and Banking" from The Great Courses (done - req. placed)

----

Research SQM and CITIC - something related to rare metals? Anyways, the trail goes cold when you pull up the charts - why would anyone want these? They've all tanked..

Alternate Row Shading in Google Sheets Using ISEVEN and ROW

You select the region of interest and then

Format > Conditional Formatting

Now, in the new dialog that showed up on the right, you have to change the dropdown below the "Format Cells if" to "Custom Formula is" and there, type in "=ISEVEN( ROW() )" (no quotes, yes = sign).

Thanks Google for making this so hard. Whoever thought something from you would be worse than what M$ sells?

Education is not the filling of a vessel but the kindling of a flame (Socrates), so here goes :

https://support.google.com/docs/table/25273?hl=en

A Triumph of Nanotech and Machine Learning

Marin Soljacic ist der Mann auf dem zehn mark schein. And I've wasted my entire life.

Your yesteryear's lightbulb operates on a simple principle. Heat the filament enough and it glows - giving you what you want - light. Unfortunately, you also get what you don't want - heat. So, a lot of the electric power you use to heat the filament is wasted.

Now, why not use some of the heat that the filament puts out to keep the filament hot - so you need a lot less electric power? Cool?

To do it, Marin and his buddies took a break from trafficking in sex slaves from Eastern Europe and built an anti-reflective coating with more than a hundred alternating layers of exotic materials. And to get it right, they used a program that embodied machine learning.

Forget 40 is the new 20. Eastern Europe is the new Silicon Valley!

The Things Windows Won't Let You Do

*ds of M$!

Anyhow, when you can't do (through Autohotkey)

Run rundll32.exe user32.dll,LockWorkStation

you can do :

Run C:\Tools\wizmo lock

https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm (wizmo is powerful - with it, you can hibernate your PC through RDC - something I never could do before. Long live productivity!)

Another handy resource : https://www.autoitscript.com/forum/topic/21848-functions-in-user32dll/

Sell Everything! Royal Bank of Scotia's Advice was Good in 2008

Interesting activity in Dialog Semiconductor today - a sudden spike that corrected in about an hour. What does it mean? Insider trading?

If Dialog issued an okay to buy back shares since they're cheap, they'd do it through their brokerage over a period of days.

What does it mean that there was suddenly a large demand for shares of DLG.F? Go figure.. go fig her. Go f her. Gopher.

Good One - From the Russians

Found this on YouTube by chance.. How do you know which side of the car your gas tank cap is on? Did you know about the arrow on the icon near the speedometer? How many times have I gotten out of the rental car? Winners don't do different things - they do things differently. After so many years in the game, if India needs the Russians to build nuclear power plants, there's something wrong mate. What's the solution? Fix the cities so the smart people are okay with staying there and can be productive (not losing 2 hours for a 4 km commute like my friend who works at Brocade in Bellandur does).

 Thanks to Maria Popova : https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/23/nine-years-of-brain-pickings/

1	Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind	It’s enormously disorienting to simply say, “I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or, above all, yourself.
2	Don't do it for prestige,status or money alone.	Read Paul Graham's how to find your life's purpose. Work on what you like, not on what you'd like to like. Remember James Marcus Bach - "Secrets of a Tampa Bay Scholar" - focus on Authentic problems. Following extrinsic motivators will burn you out eventually.
3	Be generous	with time, resources, credit, praise, your words. There's always a person at the other end - remember that.
4	Build pockets of stillness into your life	As Trevor Blake puts it - create moments of insight. Meditation, daydreaming, boredom are all ok. DON'T SKIMP ON SLEEP!!
5	When people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them	But believe them when they tell you who they are
6	Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time	Rome wasn't built in a day. That's why it's important to find work that has meaning for you.
7	See out what magnifies your spirit	People, ideas, books that elevate you - find them, hold on to them.
8	Don't be afraid to be an idealist	E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.

India Says : Visual Pollution? What's That?

The Analog Hole not About Money Anymore

A long time ago, there was something in EE Times or EDN or one of those useless newsletter purveyors about concern about the analog hole - you encrypt your stuff and all's well, but, how do you prevent copying when the content eventually is delivered to the user in an analog fashion - say from a speaker?

Skype says : We're helpless :

Adrian Asher, Skype's chief information security officer, says his company can't prevent these technologies from compromising its service: "Can we control [spyware] taking an audio stream off the speakers or the microphone? No, there is nothing we can do."

So, the real question for us small-fry is : what can we do? How safe is Linux from these monsters? Can you install something on Windows that can watch for this crap that Hu Jintao installs? Has Apple done anything about this?

Few years ago, on a trip to die Schweiss, I bumped into a guy working for Lumension (a Luxembourgian) who said that, when they had an exercise to see which platform would cave in first - the Mac was the first one that was broken into.

http://leaksource.info/2014/08/09/hack-back-a-diy-guide-for-those-without-the-patience-to-wait-for-whistleblowers/

My question is : How can I hire these geniuses to do useful things for me? I'm struggling to get my crappy CAD tools to give me what Cadence can.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8143232

I had a question : What do these smart people do for a living? I mean, the guy who took down Gamma - what does he do to pay rent?

http://www.businessinsider.com/we-found-out-how-much-money-hackers-actually-make-2015-7

Natural Remedies : The Ugly Truth

Hope the pills you take work for you, but consider what I heard from a current employee :

I don't like working here because I have to deal with chemicals and they don't give me gloves. They only give me gloves if they know there's going to be an inspection.

Yikes - reminds me of Alistair Laporte saying "Some teachers are so stupid, they'll say : I'll be giving you a surprise test tomorrow."

Way to go India

What's New In Bengaluru

Been a few years since my last jaunt. What did I notice?

• Fertility clinics everywhere. What do you blame it on? Pollution? Stress? Age?
• You actually see people with tattoos in India, and the big roads do have tattoo parlours.
• People are calling it gas instead of petrol.
• Lots of diabetes care ads - India has the most diabetics in the world.
• And, not a single cracked smartphone screen - how many of those do you see out here? Is the rest of the world just more responsible than the US?

What it Takes to Run a Successful Punjabi Dhaba

Surveillance system to keep an eye on kitchen and customers. Laptop to accept web orders (apps, etc) and play music through YouTube. Credit card machine. Check check check..

UB City

Avirate

India Says : Underground Power Lines? What's That?

Shameful - in the NEW parts of the city

My Darling India : I Love You Just the Same

What's the matter with us? Why is aesthetics lost on us? Kolkata airport.

Prudential : Wealth of Cities

http://www3.prudential.com/woc/_resources/media/the-wealth-of-cities.pdf

Disappointing - doesn't really tell me what to do. If you're a small-fry investor, what can you put your money in to benefit from the trend? Boo hoo sob.

Der Majuli Ferry

Not one Apple watch sighted. What?! Blame GOOG for the orientation fiasco - or LG.. Not me!

Guess Who

Two decades ago a visiting turbaned army retiree talked about "their navy is 23 times the size of ours." Really? How do you sum up a navy with one number? Anyhow, Global Water Power provides this comp between two pretenders :

"Kaziranga" by Nissim Ezekiel

Deer, deer...
Oh, deer!
Oh dear!
Dear, o dear, o dear..

Water buffalo
What? A buffalo?
Water buffalo!
What a buffalo!