Ok, I can verify that the FF Chartwell family makes it really easy to make Infographics
As you can see from the graphics, throughout the week, I've been slowly slipping into a state of hibernation.
Vacation infographic
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FF Chartwell – The Infographic Typeface
https://www.fontfont.com/how-to-use-ff-chartwell
FF Chartwell is essentially a clever hack on ligatures. For example, in some fonts an ‘f’ followed by an ‘i’ gets cluttered by the f’s bar overlapping with the i, or not aligning right. So fonts auto-magically replace the ‘f’ and ‘i’ with one glyph ‘fi’. (That almost certainly didn’t happen in your browser just now, but you can learn more about ligatures on Wikipedia)
Except in this case, using a feature of the OpenType standard, FF Chartwell turns the ligatures dial up to 11. In FF Chartwell Pies, text like “25+30+25+20″ gets turned into a pie chart with those numbers interpreted as percents. In FF Chartwell Bars, those same numbers would get turned into a bar graph, and so on. The graphics you create inherit the colors of the text you typed, and the text is preserved, you can simply toggle those ligatures on/off to edit the original.
Learn how to use it (and buy it) here: https://www.fontfont.com/how-to-use-ff-chartwell
Stephen Colbert presents Nasa’s TODO list for Mars manned spaceflight
I was watching the Tuesday, July 24th episode of The Colbert Report tonight, and caught this gem with some precision pausing and rewinding. I love the little things like this, and it makes me wonder who in their army of interns spent the time to flesh this list out.
Stephen Colbert's Nasa's Mars TODO list
Boy Scouts of America
As a child, my parents didn’t allow me to join the Boy Scouts of America in protest of their discriminatory policies towards gays. As an adult, I’m glad they didn’t.
It’s very inspiring to see this (not gay) Eagle Scout’s letter as he returns his Eagle Scout badge because he “cannot in good conscience hold this badge as long as the BSA continues a policy of bigotry”.
Even more inspiring to see the measured & mature method in which he goes about it.
Today I learned that creating getters & setters in PHP more than doubles execution time.
From reddit, I found this command-line snippet: http://pastie.org/638732. It reminded me that in general I want to do more of these kinds of tests. It’s bound to lead to interesting discoveries.
Any ideas what I should test myself?
> php -d implicit_flush=off -r '\
class dog {\
public $name = "";\
public function setName($name) { $this->name = $name; }\
public function getName() {return $this->name; }\
}\
$rover = new dog();\
for ($x=0; $x<10; $x++) {\
$t = microtime(true);\
for ($i=0; $i<1000000; $i++) { \
$rover->setName("rover");\
$n = $rover->getName();\
}\
echo microtime(true) - $t;\
echo "\n";}'
1.48462200165
1.49136686325
1.48365998268
1.47310495377
1.46616101265
1.44583415985
1.42663908005
1.43124985695
1.42830300331
1.42891597748
> php -d implicit_flush=off -r '\
class dog { \
public $name = "";\
}\
$rover = new dog();\
for ($x=0; $x<10; $x++) {\
$t = microtime(true); \
for ($i=0; $i<1000000; $i++) { \
$rover->name = "rover"; \
$n = $rover->name;\
}\
echo microtime(true) - $t;\
echo "\n";\
}'
0.700392007828
0.686674118042
0.687913894653
0.693347930908
0.697072982788
0.708423852921
0.709672927856
0.704964876175
0.704661130905
0.708118915558
|
Uptime
jon@localhost trunk> uptime 14:08 up 53 days, 22:35, 12 users, load averages: 2.69 1.68 1.50
Dear diary: Almost 54 days without restarting my Macbook Pro.
Skype’s chat UI changes when I unplug the power; Chrome has begun aribtrarily turning webpages to flat white. There are equally bizarre workarounds for each, but I am finally giving in and restarting.
Goodnight, sweet prince. You’ve had a good run.
Online color challenge
How well can you see colors? Women reportedly do better than men, and designers/artists tend to do better than engineers:
Can you put these in order by hue?
http://www.xrite.com/custom_page.aspx?pageid=77&lang=en
My score was 3 (best possible is 0). See if you can beat me!
Randomized Garfield comics
Someone “noticed that Garfield comics make just as much sense if you throw random panels together, and sometimes are actually pretty funny. He got a cease and desist letter. So he made the code available for people who wanted to try it for themselves.”
This is one of the mirrors:
http://www.dougshaw.com/garfield.html?3yearsislongenough
I don’t think they make “just as much” sense randomized, but since the ones that DO make sense weren’t all that much funnier, it works surprisingly well. Clever enough that it’s worth sharing (and viewing source if you’re a coder).
I suspect it’s possible to do with Cathy comics too… maybe I’ll try that this weekend 
30 Days of Programming Interviews
I’m starting a new 30 days experiment! This time with my good friend from University of Maryland, Koffi Kpetigo. Each week we’re picking one chapter from this book on programming interview questions: Cracking the Coding Interview: 150 Programming Questions and Solutions
Each chapter is themed (Arrays & Strings, Object Oriented Design, etc) so each week will be a focus on one of our top four topics. If it goes great after 30 days, then we’ll keep going until every chapter is done. Each morning, I’m waking up at the same time as before (8:30am) and doing a one-hour interview as if someone were asking me questions from that chapter. Then I’ll attempt to document that effort here, for posterity. Then, once a week, we’ll call each other up and do phone screens on questions from the “Medium” and “Hard” chapters (which are miscellaneous unthemed chapters that seem to represent the kinds of questions I’ve actually been asked in interviews.) The weeks are going to be this ordering, with today being Day 1 of the first week:
Week 1 – Chap 7: OO Design
Week 2 – Chap 3: Stacks & Queues
Week 3 – Chap 4: Trees & Graphs
Week 4 – Chap 9: Sorting and Searching
I expect I’ll get two things out of it, with hopefully a few surprise leanings thrown in as we go:
- More confidence in a variety of interview questions. Right now I typically go in to an interview with the belief that I’ll be able to figure out most problems, and a solid (though not perfect) understanding of common data structures. But I’ve never studied interview questions themselves, so I always feel like there’s something I’m missing. I’m definitely not one of those people who remembers their sorting algorithms, and I don’t feel like I’m at the point where I can say something like “Ok, this question falls into <question grouping>, which usually depends on <data structure here>, and they’re really looking to see if I can <thought process here>.” Even though I’ve been on the other side of interviewing for years, I still don’t feel like I’ve “pulled back the curtain” 100%. This should change that, or at least start.
- A couple new interview questions to use myself. I’ve been using the same one or two interview questions for a couple years now, and I’d like to switch it up. I like my current favorite a lot: it starts with basic algorithms, expands requirements in the middle, and ends up in a larger systems design conversation. But two problems I have with it are: (1) if you’ve heard a similar question for the algorithm part before, you’ll get further, and it’s close enough to a more common interview question that that’s happened a few times. I can correct for this, but I’d like to not have to. (2) I’d like to ask a harder initial question in general, so I can make a more granular evaluation of the top candidates.
Here we go!
500 Words. Day 30!
I did it!
Day 30 of my 500 Words experiment is here, and I managed not to screw it up. I’m absolutely amazed at what I’ve been able to do in just 30 days, inspired by such a seemingly small change in my morning routine.
I went from feeling like the usual “I don’t have enough time in the day” to checking off a couple major goals in my life, and coming to a major realization about how my psyche works: not making progress on any personal goals in my life actually creates a significant stress, but subconsciously. It wasn’t until I started making great progress that I noticed the relief I was feeling. Off the top of my head, here are some bullets on what I was able to accomplish: Continue reading
