Congratulations Vietnam

As General William DePuy told the French general who said the South Vietnamese were incapable of fighting : "They kicked your ass at Dien Bien Phu!"

Congratulations and congratulations Korea! Again!

China as reliable as ever. And congratulations India on picking up the pace going the other way - out of the top-50 now. Behind Saudi, Bangladesh, Peru..

Country	Team size			P1	P2	P3	P4	P5	P6	Total	Rank	Awards				Leader	Deputy leader
	All	M	F									G	S	B	HM
Republic of Korea	6	5	1	42	39	1	42	22	24	170	1	6	0	0	0	Yongjin Song	Suyoung Choi
People's Republic of China	6	6		42	25	0	42	19	31	159	2	5	1	0	0	Yijun Yao	Sihui Zhang
Vietnam	6	6		42	36	0	42	21	14	155	3	4	1	1	0	Anh Vinh Lê	Bá Khánh Trình Lê
United States of America	6	6		42	29	0	42	23	12	148	4	3	3	0	0	Po-Shen Loh	Brian Lawrence
Islamic Republic of Iran	6	6		42	32	0	42	17	9	142	5	2	3	1	0	Omid Hatami Varzaneh	Seyed Hesam Firouzi
Japan	6	6		41	21	0	42	23	7	134	6	2	2	2	0	Yasuo Morita	Keiko Tasaki
Singapore	6	6		42	26	0	37	22	4	131	7	2	1	2	1	Yan Loi Wong	Xinghuan Ai

Contestant [♀♂][←]	Country	P1	P2	P3	P4	P5	P6	Total	Rank	Award
Amirmojtaba Sabour	Islamic Republic of Iran	7	7	0	7	7	7	35	1	Gold medal
Yuta Takaya	Japan	7	7	0	7	7	7	35	1	Gold medal
Hữu Quốc Huy Hoàng	Vietnam	7	7	0	7	7	7	35	1	Gold medal
Qiuyu Ren	People's Republic of China	7	7	0	7	7	4	32	4	Gold medal
Aleksandre Saatashvili	Georgia	7	7	0	7	7	3	31	5	Gold medal
James Lin	United States of America	7	7	0	7	7	2	30	6	Gold medal

Are you, like me, wondering what was so tricky about Problem 3? (I'm clueless, ICYW). Nice variation on the curve of pursuit problem I first saw in Brilliant Tutorials (lifted from Irodov).

Problem 3. A hunter and an invisible rabbit play a game in the Euclidean plane. The rabbit’s starting point, A0, and the hunter’s starting point, B0, are the same. After n−1 rounds of the game, the rabbit is at point An−1 and the hunter is at point Bn−1.

In the n th round of the game, three things occur in order.
(i) The rabbit moves invisibly to a point An such that the distance between An−1 and An is exactly 1.
(ii) A tracking device reports a point Pn to the hunter. The only guarantee provided by the tracking device to the hunter is that the distance between Pn and An is at most 1.

(iii) The hunter moves visibly to a point Bn such that the distance between Bn−1 and Bn is exactly 1.

Is it always possible, no matter how the rabbit moves, and no matter what points are reported by the tracking device, for the hunter to choose her moves so that after 109 rounds she can ensure that the distance between her and the rabbit is at most 100?

Are Whales Standing in for People?

Use Bitcoin to Solve the "Who" Problem

Per Geoff Smart and Randy Street, Who mistakes happen when :

Menageries (managers) :

• Are unclear about what is needed in a job
• Have a weak flow of candidates
• Do not trust their ability to pick out the right candidate from a pool of similar looking candidates
• Lose candidates they really want to join their team

How?

Decide what the MISSION is. What are you trying to accomplish as a team and what will the new hire's mission be. What OUTCOMES must the new recruit realize? Be clear about what COMPETENCIES successful candidates have that enable them to be A players. Be clear about the cultural fit - what needs to exist for ALIGNMENT.

How?

• Create a SCORECARD. This tells you how you'll judge the performance of the candidate after a few months on the job.
• SOURCE lots!!! of high quality candidates.
• SELECT qualifying candidates.
• SELL them on why this position is right for them.

How to efficiently whittle down a bunch?

Use a good phone screen :

• Could you tell me about your career goals?
• What are you really good at professionally?
• What are you not good at or not interested in doing professionally?
• Who were your last five bosses and how will they rate your performance on a scale of 1-10 when we talk to them?

How?

Use a good top-grading interview :

• What were you hired to do?
• What accomplishments are you most proud of?
• What were some of the low points in that job?
• Who were the people you worked with? Specifically :
• -- what was your boss' name and how do you spell that? What was it like working with that person? What will he/she tell me were your strengths and areas for improvement?
• -- tell me about the team you inherited? How would you rate them? What changes did you make? How would you rate the team when you left?
• Why did you leave?

I Hired Your Resume, But I Got You -- Jay Jordan

From the super book "Who" : Street/Smart Who : Critical Competencies for A Players

• . Efficiency. Able to produce significant output with minimal wasted effort.
• . Honesty/integrity. Does not cut corners ethieafly. Earns trust and maintains Confidence. Does What is right, not just what is politically expedient. Speaks plainly and truthfully.
• . Organization and planning : Plans, organizes, dchedules, and budgets in an efficient productive manner, Focuses on key priorities.
• . Aggressiveness- Moves  quickly and takes a forceful Stand without being overly abrasive.
• . Follow through on Commitments : Lives  up to Verbal and written agreements, regardless of personal cost,
• - Intelligence. Learns quickly. Demonstrates ability to quickly and proficiently understand and absorb new in formation. 
• . Analytical skills. Able to structure and process qualltative or quantitative data and draw insightful conclusions from it. Exhibits a probing mind and achieves penetrating insights.
• - Attention to detail. Does not let important details Slip through the cracks or derail a project.
• - Persistence. Demonstrates tenacity and Willingness to go the distance to get something done.
• . Proactivity. Acts without being told what to do. Brings new ideas to the company.

• Ability to Hire A Players (for managers), Sources, selects, and sells A Players to join a company,
• Ability to develop People (for managers). Coaches people in their current roles to improve performance, and prepares them for future roles.
• . Flexibility/adaptability. Adjusts quickly to changing priorities and conditions. Copes effectively with complexity and change.
• , Calm under pressure. Maintains stable performance when under heavy pressure or stress.
• . Strategic thinking/visioning. Able to see and communicate the big picture in an inspiring way. Determines opportunities and threats through comprehensive analysis of current and future trends.
• . Creativity/innovation. Generates new and innovative approaches to problems.
• - Enthusiasm. Exhibits passion and excitement over work. Has a can-do attitude.
• . Work ethic. Possesses a strong willingness to work hard and sometimes long hours to get the job done. Has a track record of working hard.
• . High standards. Expects personal performance and team performance to be nothing short of the best.
• . Listening skills. Lets others speak and seeks to understand their viewpoints.
• - Openness to criticism and ideas. Often solicits feedback and reacts calmly to criticism or negative feedback.
• - Communication. Speaks and writes clearly and articulately without being overly verbose or talkative. Maintains this Standard in all forms of Written Communication including email. 
• Teamwork. Reaches out to peers and cooperates with supervisors to establish an overall collaborative working relationship.
• Persuasion. Able to convince others to pursue a course of action.

Bill Johnson, CEO of Heinz' wish list : Chemistry, Commitment, Coachability, Controlled Ego, Requisite Intellect.

Windows Startup Folder in 5 Seconds

Open a File Explorer window (using icon from Taskbar if necessary )

Then, type startup in the box as shown

Press Enter and you're done. You'll get to something like

C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

How you're supposed to know that? I don't know. Why did I want to get here? So I could put in a link to Capture2Text!! The greatest piece of Utilityware the world has ever seen

Clark's Tips a la Howard

http://clark.com/

Know : You have a health credit report too... (Milliman, Ingenix)

You can (if you ever need to) order pills of 2x the strength, which cost the same, and then cut them in half for each administration - saving yourself 50%. Nice. See me in 50 years!

Adorable Honesty : Personal History

Some lessons were impressed on me by reverse example. When I was young, I perceived grown-ups behaving quite oddly at times. I remember being shocked or dismayed by things I observed and making silent vows not to behave as they did when I grew up. For instance, my mother, when confronted with a line waiting at the movies, would go up to the box oflice and say, “I am Mrs.  Eugene Meyer of The Washington Post,” and demand to be taken in and seated. At that time, she did indeed get in. l cringed with embarrassment and hoped the ground would swallow me up. It had such a lasting effect on me that I have never been able to deal with headwaiters in restaurants who put you “in Siberia” rather than the better part of the restaurant. I just go meekly to Siberia.

Defensive Programming

Programming Defensively :

Consider designing your code to make bugs easier to track down. Bugs that raise an error far away from the root cause are harder to track down.

For example:

• Declare the expected argument types of one or more of your functions.
• You can either have the platform's evaluator perform the argument type checking or write your own code to check.
• Include assertions in your code that check for a condition that holds if things are in working order.
• Write a function to check that a condition holds and raise an error if the condition does not hold.

Then and Now : How FANGS Loom Large

From visualcapitalist.com

How To "Variablize" Your Environment Settings

You have

export bad_guy='machiavelli_the_3.12.3'
export path = 'x:y:z:/usr/lib/machiavelli_the_3.12.3'
export bad_home='/usr/lib/share/utils/machiavelli_the_3.12.3/bin'

you get the idea. You want to upgrade machiavelli to an even more devious character - once - in ONE place.

So you'd rather see :

export bad_guy='machiavelli_the_3.12.3'
export path = 'x:y:z:/usr/lib/'$bad_guy''
export bad_home='/usr/lib/share/utils/'$bad_guy'/bin'

You get the idea..

This is the best I have .. not even sure how to google this.. Pretty inelegant. Also,  you can't just pipe your existing file through this in your editor :(

#!/usr/bin/perl

$file = shift;
$var = shift;

$sys = "grep $var $file";

$var_line = `$sys`;

$val = (split( /'/ , $var_line ))[1];

print $var_line ;

$sys = q{grep -v }.$var.' '.$file.q{ | perl -p -e 's/\b}.$var_val.q{\b/\047\$}.$var.q{\047/;'};

$rem = `$sys`;

print $rem;

How It's Done : Dov Moran

Congratulations. Enough said..

http://nocamels.com/2013/03/dov-moran-talks-to-nocamels-about-sandisk-comigo-modu/

The Magic of Taek Joo Kim, Now Working for AMZN

Man, I love it! Omnibox timer - you can tell Chrome to remind you to get up and walk - and it'll literally "tell" you - it pronounces your message.

How does the man do it?

https://github.com/taicki/omnibox-timer

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/omnibox-timer/iooaeaogjngpihndkcednkblomlkaaif?hl=en-US

Handy Excel Hacks

https://excelwithbusiness.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/100-Excel-Tips_EwB.pdf

Paste Special : ALT E S V
Also, Transpose can be very handy at times.
Add Multiple Rows
F4 for Absolute Reference - did you know that pressing F4 repeatedly will toggle through the various combos?

A treasure trove!

Excel howto : Quickly ID a Column of Text Using a Perl Hack

Okay, that doesn't make sense. Here's what you want to do :


A
B
C
C
A
A
D
D
D
A

to turn to (you guessed it - for use in Pivot tables)

1
2
3
3
1
1
4
4
4
1

select all and pipe through (Yes, you see why you want Cygwin :)

perl -n -e 'BEGIN{%table=(); $count=0} chomp; unless( defined $table{$_} ){ $table{$_} = $count++; } print "$_," and print $table{$_} and print "\n";'

This will give you
A,1
A,1
B,2
...

So you can easily paste this back in by doing the smart import..

Here's a braindead way to show text in Excel pivot table values area :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wslp2BqHuz8

Shame on Contextures Inc.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Google Chrome

Which imbecile came up with CTRL-D for "bookmark"? CTRL-D is for "duplicate" - every i knows that. Surely?

What if you need to change it? (to duplicate that is)

You open a new tab and, in the URL field, type :

chrome://extensions

Now, scroll to the bottom and click on "Get more extensions"

That takes you to the Chrome Web Store. In the search field, enter "keyboard shortcuts".

Then, pick the one by Mike Crittenden.

Install it and then, in the space next to the URL field in Chrome (on the right), you'll see the icon for this tool .. it has a 'Q' in the top-left corner..

Right-click on this guy and, in the drop-down menu, choose Options. How are you supposed to know this? Don't ask me :)

Now, you get to place where you can easily add new shortcuts. Nice work.

https://github.com/mikecrittenden/chrome-shortkeys

Wer ist das Genius?

Who is the genius behind this super blog that teaches you amazing stuff. He ain't no Jacob Vandenplas or Rachel Tatman (just kidding :) probably better ) but ... he's..

Armed with a 4.0 GPA in Computer Science from Napoli (Bachelors and Masters), he's now at :

Senior Data Scientist
Hive | Centrica Hive Limited
May 2017 – Present
Cambridge, United Kingdom
I work with a large team of data scientists across a number of projects. My responsibilities include:
- design of Machine Learning models to integrate into real-time products
- manage stakeholders communicating results and set expectations
- mentoring other data scientists

Congratulations mensch. Great stuff.

Supercell (Clash of C) Nails It

http://supercell.com/en/our-story/

We’ve found that the best quality work comes from small teams in which every single member is passionate about what they do. Often times when teams become bigger, processes, bureaucracy and even politics emerge, and the work just isn’t fun anymore. That’s why we wanted to create an organizational model made up of very small teams, or “cells” as we call them. Supercell is a collection of these cells. Each game comes from a cell, and they all operate extremely independently and have complete control over their own roadmap. Our organizational model is optimized for speed and passion, not for control.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwuEwhX1M_M

Japan : Whales :: China : Donkeys

What won't these people eat?

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-41524710

How to Paste Image in Clipboard into (at) a Cell in Excel

Well "into" means "at" a particular cell.

Try it with just on Excel file open. You'll see that Excel always dumps the picture right at the top. What a pain? Thanks Satya for another dose of crappiness. Where would Mac be without something really crappy to compare to?

Anyway, the workaround is

Have a scratchpad Excel doc open.
Paste the image from clipboard into *that* scratchpad.
Right-click on the image in the scratchpad and choose "Copy"
Now, go back to *your* working Excel doc and select the cell you want to paste at.
Do Ctrl-V

Excel Pivot Table Torture

Python pandas can do it, but, of course, M$ Excel can't. When will Redmond learn from open s?

You want values that are plain text, not numbers. What can you do?

The first order of business is to create an accompanying column of numbers - a unique number for each text item. That is, if your column has

A
A
B
D
E
F
A
C

Then, you want

A 0
A 0
B 1
D 2
E 3
F 4
A 0
C 5

perl -n -e 'BEGIN{%table=(); $count=0} chomp; unless( defined $table{$_} ){   $table{$_} = $count++; } print "$_," and print $table{$_} and print "\n";' 

(Meaning, copy that one column into a text editor - aka NEdit - in Cygwin, and then pipe through the above perl script :) (See why you need unix? :)

Then, you run into the other roadblock. You add this column to your existing Table, and the Pivot Tables simply don't see it. WT*? Luckily, "how to refresh pivot table options" with Google delivers - and works..

A Horizontal Bar Chart (Plot) with Seaborn (Python)

 Why? Coz Seaborn gives you something better looking by default :)

series1= starterDf['col_of_interest'].value_counts()


df_for_sns = series1.rename_axis('col_of_interest').reset_index(name='counts') #change counts if you w

import seaborn as sns
sns.set_style('white') # if you want..

sns.barplot( y='col_of_interest', x="counts", data=df_for_sns)
sns.despine( top=True, bottom=True , left=True, right=True )

Thanks to : https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47136436/python-pandas-convert-value-counts-output-to-dataframe

So You Want to Work with Andrew Ng?

The following would also be helpful, but isn’t required:

• A degree in CS is preferred. Completion of Computer Science or other relevant MOOCs will also be helpful. 
• Experience with big data systems such as Hadoop, Spark, Nifi, Storm, HDFS, NFS, Lustre, Presto, Hive, AWS Redshift, AWS Athena.
• Experience leading an engineering team
• Experience with industrial data-driven/AI/Machine learning projects
• Strong willingness to help junior engineers
• Mandarin (Chinese) fluency is a plus

We hope you will fit well with our team’s culture:

Strong work ethic. All of us believe in our work’s ability to change human lives, and consequently work not just smart, but also hard. It’s not unusual to see some team members in the office late into the evening; many of us routinely work and study 70+ hours a week.

Growth mindset: We are eager to teach you new skills and invest in your continual development. But learning is hard work, so this is something we hope you’ll want to do.

Good team member: We care and watch out for each other. We’re humble individually, and go after big goals together.

Flexibility: Since we’re an early stage company, you should be flexible in your tasks and do whatever is needed, ranging from dirty work like data cleaning, to high-level work like algorithm design.

Massimo Banzi (Arduino) Bookshelf

• Out of Control
• Art of the Digital Age (Bruce Wands)
• Total Interaction
• Designing Interactions (Bill Moggridge)
• The semantic turn
• METAMAGICAL THEMAS (Douglas Hofstadter)
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Physical Computing
• past tense, future sense
• DEUTSCHE STANDARDS
• pROCESS
• Open Design Now
• World Changing - a User's Guide for the 21st Century (Alex Steffen. "passivhaus buildings, biomimicry, intros by Van Jones and Bill McKibben (350.org) )
• Paper Prototyping (about designing user interfaces) (Carolyn Snyder)

How to Be a Good Codebreaker : Wolf (William) Friedman

Under mental equipment he would also include the faculty of being able to concentrate on a problem for rather long periods of time, without distraction, nervous irritability, and impatience. The strain under which cryptanalytic studies are necessarily conducted is quite severe and too long-continued application has the effect of draining nervous energy to an unwholesome degree, so that a word or two of caution may not here be out of place. One should continue at work only so long as a peaceful, calm spirit prevails, whether the work is fruitful or not. 'But just as soon as the mind becomes wearied with the exertion, or just as soon as a feeling of hopelessness or mental fatigue intervenes, it is better to stop completely and turn to other activities, rest, or play. It is essential to remark that systematization and orderliness of work are aids in reducing nervous tension and irritability. On this account it is better to take the time to prepare the data carefully, rewrite the text if necessary, and so on, rather than work with slipshod, incomplete, or improperly arranged material.

https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/declassified-documents/military-cryptanalysis/mil_crypt_I.pdf

How Will You Find the Longest Words Shakespeare Used (Perl)

1. Get them text from : https://ocw.mit.edu/ans7870/6/6.006/s08/lecturenotes/files/t8.shakespeare.txt
2. vi ./shakesp.txt    # get rid of the obviously easy stuff - a look through tells you up to what point (sonnets start) you can safely delete :)
3. perl -n -000 -e 'print unless /^\s*\d+\s*$|ELECTRONIC|^\s*the\s+end\s*$|project\s+gutenberg|etext/i;' ./shakesp.txt > shakeclean.txt
4. perl -p -e 's/[^a-zA-Z\047]/\n/g; s/(.)/\L$1/g;' shakeclean.txt | perl -nl -e 'chomp; print if length > 13;' | sort | uniq | perl -n -0'' -e '@words = split( "\n" ); @sorted = sort { length $b <=> length $a } @words; $longest = join "\n", @sorted; print "$longest";'

honorificabilitudinitatibus (Love's Labour Lost)
anthropophaginian
indistinguishable
undistinguishable
incomprehensible
superserviceable
circumscription
disproportioned
distemperatures
distinguishment
enfranchisement
excommunication
extraordinarily
flibbertigibbet
impossibilities
indistinguish'd
interchangeably
interchangement
interrogatories
misconstruction
notwithstanding
particularities
perpendicularly
portotartarossa
praeclarissimus
prognostication
superstitiously
transformations
uncompassionate
uncomprehensive
undistinguished
unreconciliable
accommodations
accomplishment
acknowledgment
administration
affectionately
apprenticehood
carnarvonshire
circumstantial
consanguineous
considerations
conspectuities
constantinople
contemptuously
contumeliously
correspondence
counterfeiting
determinations
discomfortable
discontentedly
disparagements
distemperature
entertainments
fortifications
halfpennyworth
handicraftsmen
imperceiverant
inconveniences
insurrection's
intelligencing
inter'gatories
interpretation
leicestershire
mephostophilus
nebuchadnezzar
northumberland
oscorbidulchos
preposterously
principalities
proportionable
reconciliation
sovereignvours
superscription
transformation
unaccommodated
understandings
unpremeditated
unproportion'd
unquestionable
unthankfulness
voluptuousness

Oh For a Better Python Debugger

Are there any debuggers that, when they tell you they run into an issue when you did "continue" can also tell you what steps to take to get the line before you get the problem?

Someone should make one and upgrade the pdb likewise.

The Underwhelming Genius of Guido van Rossum's Underlings

$ pip install XlsxWriter
Requirement already satisfied: XlsxWriter in c:\users\USERNAME\appdata\local\programs\python\python35-32\lib\site-packages

$ python -m XlsxWriter
/usr/bin/python: No module named XlsxWriter

Why can't python or even pip for that matter put out a warning about PYTHONPATH? What single mom with three kids and a mortgage needs to find out she has cancer before they put this in?

Das mensch suggests python -m pip install is a panacea. Really?

 $ python -m pip install XlsxWriter
Collecting XlsxWriter
  Using cached XlsxWriter-0.9.8-py2.py3-none-any.whl
Installing collected packages: XlsxWriter
Successfully installed XlsxWriter-0.9.8
 $ python -m !$
python -m XlsxWriter
C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda3\envs\aind\python.exe: No module named XlsxWriter

WT*!!??

Okay, reading and reading and reading (for all the protesting CS folks do about user experience, when it comes to free stuff, unless you're the product (think GOOG)) you get what you pay for. Why can't they issue a warning saying (say) "importing usually uses the name in lowercase completely". Why not ease the pain?

So, if I set my PYTHONPATH and then do python -m xlsxwriter.worksheet, I actually do get something.. 

Fastest Way to a List of 0's in Python

list = [0] * 12

Nice. Didn't know you could do that..

Inspire Your Co-Workers with a Screensaver

So you want to display quotes on your computer's locked screen when you're not at your desk. There's one way I know. Looking for a powerpoint that will sequence through slides like in kiosk mode? Sorry, that's not an option (yet) in Windows 10 for the lock screen.

Save your ppt as JPEG images (File > Save As > change the format - the name you provide will be a folder containing each slide)

That done, click on the Window (Start button) on the left of your taskbar and then on the Gear (settings). You'll launch Windows Settings.

Here, in the search box, type "lock" (it might suggest "add a folder to your lock screen slideshow", but don't jump the gun.

At the new menu, change the "Background" option from "Windows Spotlight" to "Slideshow" (drop down)

Then, under "Choose albums for your slideshow", add your new folder.

Then, click on "Advanced slideshow settings" and adjust "When my PC is inactive, show lock .." and "Turn off screen after slideshow has played for".. to your choice.

And that's it. Hit WIN-L and see the result!

Yes, the slides will be displayed in random order - nothing you can do about that :(

Perl Insert Contents of One File Into Another at Line Matching Regex

Nice to have something I think is better than stackexchange - how often does that happen :) ?

To insert after a line matching the regex

perl -n -i -e 'print; print `cat FILE_TO_INSERT` if m#REGEX_TO_MATCH#; ' FILE_TO_MODIFY

To insert before :

perl -n -i -e 'print `cat FILE_TO_INSERT` if m#REGEX_TO_MATCH#; print;' FILE_TO_MODIFY

If you want the insertion to happen at the first match ONLY :

perl -n -i -e 'print `cat FILE_TO_INSERT` if m?REGEX_TO_MATCH?; print;' FILE_TO_MODIFY

A very valid question is, what do you do if your match pattern has the question-mark character? :)

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/32908/how-to-insert-the-content-of-a-file-into-another-file-before-a-pattern-marker

Jordan Sissel Kennt Nicht Seine Eigene Tool

he says :

Example: Send ctrl+c to all windows matching title 'gdb' (See COMMAND CHAINING) xdotool search --name gdb key ctrl+c

But that doesn't work - no sir.

Fortunately, 

xdotool windowactivate `xdotool search --name gdb` ; xdotool key ctrl+c

Works, by the power of G!!

Kudos :

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/214909/xdotool-does-not-send-keys

Schooled in Efficient Code - by Udacity

Take a sudoku grid and implement the only-choice - that is, when you have multiple choices for numbers to put in a square - when one of those choices occurs only in this square, you know what to do..

My answer :

    for box in unit :
        for choice in grid[box] :
            others = ''.join( [ grid[x] for x in unit if not x == box ] )
            if not re.search( choice , others ) :
                grid[box] = choice

And U :

    for digit in '123456789':
         dplaces = [box for box in unit if digit in values[box]]
         if len(dplaces) == 1:
             values[dplaces[0]] = digit

For each number in 1..9, they get the boxes that contain that number and then, when there's only one box for a particular number, they assign that number to that box - yes, you'll be doing some redundant work, but ain't the code short and sweet?

Look at me - I first get a string made up of the contents of all the other boxes and then I check if this box's contents (one number at a time) occur in that string..

How Do You Get the German Style Opening Double Quote „?

https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-use-German-quotation-marks-on-a-U-S-international-keyboard-without-ALT-codes

Ans : ALT + 0132  (ensure your Num Lock is set for the numeric keypad)

FBI Behavioral Analyst's Tips for Connecting with People

Stuff I can use :)

https://www.theladders.com/p/21217/fbi-behavior-expert-like-trust

The Underwhelming Genius of Guido van Rossum

or whoever coded the regex engine.. Why can't they just try to be as good as Perl?

re.match( pat, string)

pat = '('

gets :

error: error( 'u...thesis',)

WT*? Have these guys never heard of abort, retry, fail?

Microsoft Excel : How to Put Thumbs Up Down Symbols

Does it involve conditional formatting?  YES

Is this super easy? NO - it's EASY but not SUPER easy - you unfortunately have to jump through a couple of hoops. You would think they would have included Thumbs Up and Thumbs Down in their Icon Sets, but, that's M$ for you :)

========================================

1. The column of interest - you will have to enter capital C where you want the Thumps Up, Capital D for Thumbs Down - no way around this.

2. In the top-most cell, enter a C and change the font from the default to Wingdings. You'll see the C change to a Thumps Up.

3. Make it bold and Green font if you wish and change the font size if you wish. Done? Drag through all rows

4. Now, with all rows of this column selected, assuming the top-most (not header) cell is E3, go to Conditional Formatting and choose New Rule

5. Now, enter this formula (adjust the E3 to what it needs to be in your case - the coordinates of the top-most data cell in your table)

6. Set the Format to what you need - probably Red since Green would be for Thumbs Up.

That's it, enjoy..

Alan Skorkin's Treasure Trove (Bash Shortcuts)

http://www.skorks.com/2009/09/bash-shortcuts-for-maximum-productivity/

The ones I didn't know about :

Ctrl + k - delete from cursor to end of command line
Ctrl + u - delete from cursor to start of command line
Ctrl + w - delete backwards one word
Ctrl + y - paste text victimized by most recent deletion
Ctrl + xx - move between start of command line and current cursor position
Alt + b/f - back/forward one word
Alt + d - delete to end of word
Alt + c - capitalize start of word and go to end of word
Alt + u - make uppercase from cursor to end of word
Alt + l - make lowercase from cursor to end of word
Alt + t - swap current word with previous (SO COOL!)
Alt + . - insert last word of previous command

!blah:p - print out the command that !blah would run and add it to history
!* - previous command except for the FIRST word (even geniuses get it wrong sometimes :)
!!:s/foo/bar - execute previous command by replacing foo with bar

And, nuggets from Linux Foundation's EDX course : http://tersamgt.blogspot.com/2015/01/almost-20-years-with-unix-mann-kann.html

Life's Tough : Out of the Blue Git-bash Can't Find Python

Must be ransomware. Just like that PC turns off last night and now, can't get Python action in Git bash. What gives?

All history gone too.. scary

The Kofman Gap

Nice :

Conscious employees take responsibility for their life. They don't compromise human values for material success. They speak the truth and listen to others’ truth with honesty and respect. They look for Creative Solutions to disagreements and honor their commitments impeccably. They are in touch with their emotions and express them productively.

Unconscious employees do the opposite. They blame others for problems, seek immediate gratification regardless of ethics and claim to be always right. They hide significant information, sweep conflicts under the table and negotiate to beat their opponents. They expect to get what they need without asking, make irresponsible promises and don't honor their commitments. They repress their emotions or explode irrationally.

Conscious employees require conscious managers if they are to fully commit their energy to organizational goals. Unless they feel acknowledged, supported, and challenged by their managers, conscious employees will withdraw.

-- couldn't have put it better.

Not nice :

How to deal with unconscious employees? How do you push them out in a nice way? 

Daily Learning :) Cool Websites

1. 10-minute-email - when you need something just to subscribe to something :)
2. Madeon's Adventure Machine - make your own techno!
3. Camel Camel Camel - AMZN price history
4. Hacker typer - impress friends :) ( a prank )
5. Hike Mt. Everest in 3D
6. Down for everyone (a website) or just me?

Gems from Ashlee Vance

Musk has taken industries like aerospace and automotive that America seemed to have given up on and recast them as something new and fantastic. At the heart of this transformation are Musk's skills as a software maker and his ability to apply them to machines. He's merged atoms and bits in ways that few people thought possible, and the results have been spectacular.

Okay, I thought that was good, until I read :

(oh, thanks to Omkar Pawaskar, you can read for free without Vance getting richer :) :

While Musk had exceled as a self-taught coder, his skills weren’tnearly as polished as those of the new hires. They took one look atZip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software.Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientistsneeded just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects intochunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into theclassic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers callhairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk formysterious reasons.

Handy Perl for Tax Time

Convert

1/15/15 Bought 10 MXL MAXLINEAR INC $14.38 4.95 164.2
1/2/16 Bought 60 MXL MAXLINEAR INC $14.38 4.95 724
3/2/2016 Sold -52 MXL MAXLINEAR INC $17.14 4.95 $0.03 $886.31

to

3/2/2016 MXL 70 886.31 various 888.2

You'll generate a bunch of these I hope and later put the column headings on - in Excel :

sell-date, ticker, quantity, proceeds, buy-date, cost-basis...... profit/loss easy to do in Excel..

Use :

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

open( INFO, "$source");

$cost = 0;
$sale = 0;
$qty = 0;
$buy_d = '';

while( ){
 /^\s*(\S+)\s+(\S+)\D+(\d+)\s+(\S+).+\s+\(?\$?([^\s)]+)\)?\h*\r?$/; $type = $2; $date = $1; $q = $3; $tick = $4; $total = $5; $total =~ s/,//g; if( $type =~ /bought/i ){ $qty += $q; $cost += abs( $total ); unless( 'various' eq $buy_d ){ if( '' eq $buy_d ){ $buy_d = $date; } else{ $buy_d = 'various'; } } } else { $sale += abs( $total ); $sell_d = $date;
  $sell_q = $q;

}

print; } $cost = $cost*$sell_q/$qty; print "\n$sell_d,$tick,$sell_q,$sale,$buy_d,$cost\n";

The astute reader will notice that I'm dumping a CSV line - so you could just pipe through perl -p -e 's/,/ /g;' - which will of course mess up the original - but who cares :) CSV's are more useful in Excel..

Python is Crap Compared to Perl

When it comes to text processing.

Okay, this is a known fact. Question - why hasn't this gotten more attention?

How would you do this?

string : "Mary had a little lamb1" --> "Mary had1 a little lamb" . Okay, a lame example - I want to append a 1 after a d or a b. In perl, it's as simple as s/([db])/${1}1/g . What is it in Python????

Here's a guy who barely scratches the surface. A valiant attempt though .. better half a loaf.

What is the equivalent of using curly braces for variable names within interpolated strings?????

Anyways, here's one way of accomplishing this particular task (Thanks!) :

re.sub( r"(?P)[db])" , r"\g1" , myString )

Enjoy..

Always Valid Excel Time of Last Modification in a Cell

This one is crap : https://www.extendoffice.com/documents/excel/954-excel-created-last-modified-time.html

Look elsewhere..

It's simple :

=NOW()

And then, select that same cell, and Format > Format Cells and click on the one that says m/d/yyyy h:mm and then, when you do that, notice that the Type: field has now gotten populated. Click there and change to m/d/yy h:mm unless you expect to live till 9999 AD :)

And of course, it's not perfect :) You guessed it :) If you undo your change, then the cell doesn't retract :)

Who can be a hero and figure this out?

Who Are These Geniuses? Instant OCR

And how can I get into the act? Wow!

Chris Brochtrup seems to be the name. Genius doesn't even have a LinkedIn. Man!

Ask and you shall receive

A Giant of Tech - Why Had I Never Heard of Him Before?

Reading this guy's book now and I highly recommend it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LXw2PYvdN8

As we struggled to get Pixar off the ground, Deming's work was like a beacon that lit my way. I was fascinated by the fact that, for years, so many American business leaders had been unable to even conceive of the wisdom of this thinking. It wasn't that they were rejecting Deming's ideas as much as they were utterly blind to them. Their certainty about their existing systems had rendered them unable to see. They'd been on top for a while, after all. Why did they need to change their ways?

It would be decades before Deming's ideas took hold here. In fact, it wasn't until the 1980s when a few companies in Silicon Valley, such as HP and AAPL, began to incorporate them. But Deming's work would make a huge impression on me and help frame my approach to managing Pixar going forward. While Tootay was a hierarchical organization, to be sure, it was guided by a democratic central tenet: You don't have to ask permission to take responsibility.

A few years ago, when Toyota stumbled - initially failing to acknowledge serious problems with their braking systems, which led to a rare public embarrassment - I remember being struck that a company as smart as Toyota could act in a way that ran so counter to one of its deepest cultural values. Whatever these forces are that make people do dumb things, they are powerful, they are often invisible, and they lurk even in the best of environments.

IN the 80s, while we were building Pix, Steve was spending most of his time trying to establish PeST, the personal computer co he'd started after being forced out of AAPL. He came to the Pix offices only once a year - so rarely, in fact, that we had to give him directions each time. But I was a regular visitor to PeST. Ever few weeks, I'd head down to Steve's office in Redwood City to brief him on our progress. I didn't relish the meetings, to be honest, because they were often frustrating. As we struggled to figure out how to make Pix profitable, we needed frequent infusions of Steve's money to stay afloat. He often tried to put conditions on the money, which was understandable but also complicated because the conditions he imposed - whether they involved marketing or engineering new products - didn't always correspond to our realities.

No time? Here's someone trying to make money off a summary :)
Toyota Culture : Another pending read

Who Are These Geniuses?

Ask and you shall receive :)

The infamous position. I've been doing the cube routinely (memorized solutions of course, nothing original) for almost 2 years now.. no clue how I got in this state..

Verdict :

Okay, good to know you can mishandle your cube and have such things happen without some prankster swapping stickers..

And... you betcha - just did the top-right as I was holding it and applied the old moves and got it clean. Good :)

Now! Unix Delete All Files (Including Directories) Less Than Five Minutes Old

find . -mmin -5 -exec rm -rf {} \;

Thank you

Now that's what I Call Great Journalism

Except, what's President Dumb going to do about it? He's going to ban immigration into the top paying charities, that's what.

https://www.gfmag.com/topics/syndicate/39743130-charity-officials-are-increasingly-receiving-million-dollar-paydays

Anthony Tersigni : Ascension Health Alliance : $18 million, about 30b in operating revenue

Congratulations Andrea Fuller.

"The leaders of one small ministry earned several times that. Hal Lindsey and his wife, JoLynn, operate Hal Lindsey Website Ministries, a Texas-based evangelical group. Mr. Lindsey hosts the "Hal Lindsey Report, " available online and on Christian television networks, and is the author of books on current events and prophecy.

The charity's revenue in 2014, which came almost solely from contributions, was $8.1 million. The ministry paid Mr. Lindsey $2.2 million and his wife $1.8 million. For each, this included a $1.5 million bonus.

Mr. Lindsey, 87 years old, and his wife, 62, declined to be interviewed. In a written statement, Mr. Lindsey said the bonuses were approved by the board and intended as one-time retirement benefits. He said he worked many years for little or no compensation.

The ministry's IRS filings show it paid Mr. Lindsey less than $50,000 during most years in the early 2000s but paid him and his wife a total of more than $7.8 million from 2007 through 2014."

What about Paula Wallace!! Head of Savannah College of Art and Design - how do they rake in $400 million  year? She raked in $10 million in 2014 and at least 1m a year for the prior 10 years. Here's what she's bragging about :

Letter from the president

Welcome!

Thirty-eight years ago, my family and I invented SCAD ex nihilo. I still marvel at the faith that the very first SCAD students and professors placed — sight unseen — in what would soon become a revolution in higher education. In founding SCAD, I was led by the principle that education is a fundamentally optimistic endeavor, one that presupposes that minds and bodies can be transformed through changes in behavior. Further, I believed that this same principle applied to arts education. Creativity can be taught and refined!