A couple of months ago, my wife and I stayed over our friends’ house in their redone guest room when I received a phone call a little after 10a. It was another friend who had 1p reservations for 3 at The French Laundry, a 3 Michelin Star restaurant (as of 2010, the only one in […]
Last month I went on a few training hikes for an upcoming backpacking trip, and on the final two, I took along my GPS. Google Earth provides a wealth of options for visualizing GPS data, but I wanted to get a better understanding of what was going on under the hood. So I exported my […]
10 years ago, I worked for a company where I worked very closely with designers to create websites that typically had a lot of playful movement/interaction/motion graphics. While a lot of the coding dealing with motion attempted to mimic real-world physics and trigonometry e.g. friction and trajectories, in a number of instances I ended up […]
Problem #15 Starting in the top left corner in a 20 by 20 grid, how many routes are there to the bottom right corner? I often used this question during interviews and suprisingly, very few candidates were able to make much progress with it. I wasn’t looking for a candidate to code it 100% correctly […]
With more than half a century (I hope) before time runs out for me, it’s premature to start a bucket list, yet I do have a vague mental list of things I’d like to experience. They’re not in any order; however, sometimes a particular item gets moved to the top. This happened recently when I […]
A few months ago, my wife and I travelled to Pakistan to attend a friend’s brother’s wedding, stopping in Dubai on the way (photos). For as long as I can remember, receiving mail from other places has ranked high on my list of “neat things” and no amount of globalization has changed that. Postcards capture […]
Problem #12 Find the first triangle number to have over 500 divisors. As I’m progressing through these problems, certain types/sequences of numbers keep popping up. I’ve started a library of functions called eulerLib.py. The first thing I did was add a triangle number generator to my library: def triangleNumber(): num = 1 add = 2 […]
Over the last 16 years, since I was of legal age for paid employment, I have been inundated with advice about how to take advantage of tax laws while planning for retirement. Never mind that traditional retirement was 40+ years away. Most people have seen the graphs illustrating the power of compounding e.g. if one […]
Last year, my wife and I planned a trip to Dubai and Pakistan (for a friend’s brother’s wedding). February 20 – 22 we’d be in Dubai and the rest of the trip would be spent in various parts of Pakistan. While my friends and many people on the Internet claimed a Desert Safari should be […]
It’s time to get back to discovering how much math and python I’ve forgotten… Problem #9 Find the only Pythagorean triplet (a,b,c where a < b < c and a^2 + b^2 = c^2) where a + b + c = 1000. The first thing I decided to do was figure out some bounds based […]
