Integgroll
This guy's opinions do not reflect those of his employer. Obviously.
Distilling Good Programmers From Chaff
5 months ago
Lots of people “Know how to program”. Many of them passed their college level classes with high marks. My issue with this is that so many Computer Science programs in colleges work on teaching you a programming language rather than a programming process. So what you end up with are a bunch of copy and paste monkeys that know how to use Google to find some code snippits, and then paste them into your enterprise solution. Many companies understand this and like to present potential new hires with some coding questions that the person applying for the job have to fill out. Here are a few of the ones that I would ask, and what kinds of responses I would look for.
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Python Multi-threading
11 months ago
by integgroll
in Code
I have found that in my uses of python I have a need for multi-threaded applications. Well not so much a need, but it certainly speeds things up in this new world of multi-core processors, and parallel processing, or CUDA processing. When I am doing a bunch of tasks that can happen simultaneously I find that it is easiest to toss them out to threads, which python makes incredible easy. Here is an example of what I like to do.
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The Importance of Good Ice
1 year ago
by integgroll
in Curling
Our curling seasons are a few weeks in here in Dallas. We have three leagues going right now, all playing once a week on 4 sheets of ice. We have our fare share of people playing in multiple leagues, myself included, but we are pretty close to 85 members!
Today I want to talk about ice. I would like to preface things by saying that I have only curled in a handful of clubs around the country, all of them were of course arena ice. So needless to say I cannot wait until I get a chance to curl on some real ice. However I have curled on a bunch of various different surfaces, and have some thoughts on the matter. The ice is the soul of your club, more so than your president, more than your club’s “Norm”, and more than if your club had a literal heart in a jar.
What I mean by that is that when it comes down to it curling is about fun, it is just the soul of the game. However when you hurl a stone down the sheet and it starts to fall off the boards right as you let it go, and then you can watch it “snake” down the ice, then the next thing you know your skip has his broom up in the air and is waving it at you as if it were on fire, your fun has gone down. Three ends later you are trying to strike up a conversation with the teams on the other sheets and they have that scowl on their face that makes you cringe and turn back to your own game, your fun has gone down. You close your eyes and just toss the rock down the ice and just letting go whenever, not caring if you hog the stone; the stone ends up in a better place than when you ‘make’ your shot, your fun has gone down. Both teams want to win, but even if you do win it isn’t because you played better, it is because the ice was bad and they didn’t get the same “luck” that you did, you fun goes down.
This all accumulates week after week, until you really start thinking about not showing up. No matter how much you love the sport, you aren’t playing that sport any more, you are chunking rocks down some ice. Wii Curling would be closer to the real thing. So when it comes down to it, if you start to hear people complaining week after week about how poor the ice is, and how they can’t make a shot, or if you are making your shots, but only because you know how to work the ice think of the following. You should start trying to change things and make things so that all players have a good time, as opposed to the few who have figured out how to win on bad ice.
Courteous Driving
1 year ago
by integgroll
in Something Else
As I drive around Dallas, on my way home from work for example, I see all sorts of crazy stunts that people pull in an attempt to get home more quickly. But more importantly I see people who are trying to get to their location faster than the guy next to them. So in an attempt to help this issue, I have put together a few ideas that will help increase everyone’s driving experience.
Step 1: A Car Is Not a Time Machine. I realize that your job is making you ghost work for half a department, and that you work up 20 minutes late because of it and because of that you are going to be late. But the first thing you need to realize is that you cutting someone off, or running a stale yellow light, or even driving all the way up to the on-ramp and then stopping until someone lets you on does nothing but slow other people down. When they get slowed down, then they do the same things which slow more people down, which then in turn causes everyone to be later, and traffic to last longer. But when it comes down to it, even these things don’t save that much time, and I understand the opinion that “sure it only saves me 5 minutes, but when I am going to be 5 minutes late that is when it matters”, really though you need to base your schedule on your driving time, don’t base your driving on your schedule time.
Step 2: Stop Sign Procedure. I see you doing it when I am driving, that is right you in the Mustang, or you in the Giganto-SUV, and heck even the guy in the sedan, no car type is perfect. What is it you ask? Driving all the way up to the curb and then “stopping at a stop sign”. Nothing scares me more than when I am driving past a road that has a stop sign and I see some gigantic truck or SUV barreling up to the street that I am driving on, and then stopping mere inches before they hit my car. There is a reason that stop signs are a good 5 feet before the street, that reason is that you are supposed to stop at the stop signs, meaning that when you approach a stop sign, if your front bumper passes that stop sign before you have come to a complete stop, you have run that stop sign, and I wish the police would write you a ticket for it. Please, stop scaring the crap out of people, causing them to put on the brakes and then impede traffic behind them because you are in too much of a hurry to stop 5 feet earlier, when you are supposed to.
Step 3: Observe Roadsigns. I know you think that because you were not paying attention and then it is all of a sudden time for your exit that you can zoom across four lanes of traffic and then squeeze into the tiniest of space between cars and somehow magically make your exit and not get in a wreck yourself. What this does though is create a slowdown that will last for hours. It literally will take until the next day for this sort of thing to go away, so please don’ do it. If you find yourself in a situation where you are about to or have missed your exit, turn, lane change, or whatever; please do the rest of us a favor, calmly make your way lane by lane to the next exit, take that one, and then turn around and try again, or take back streets or side roads.
Step 4: Getting Pulled Over. It happens, even I get pulled over from time to time. But what you should to to help prevent traffic issues when you are pulled over is not to pull onto the shoulder, or onto the side of the road, or into a turn lane. Those do nothing but put the officer’s life in danger, and put them on edge, but it also causes traffic to rubberneck and slow down even more. Instead do the following when you see the flashing lights in your rear-view mirror.
- Put on your hazard lights
- Slow down and make your way off the highway if you are on one
- Stop in a well lit public place that does not impede the flow of traffic
There are federal laws on the books that allow you to travel to a location that you feel is safe before pulling over, you should use these laws to not only help keep yourself safe, but keep the officers off of the roads where they can be clipped by cars. Once you explain what you did and why, I promise you most officers will be alright with it, and the few that are not, well they were going to beat you anyways.
Using these four handy tips we can all help to make sure that our commute every day is a little bit safer, speedier, and sweeter in the future. I would like to thank my mom for imparting such good driving morals on me when I was younger, and I am proud to say that I not only drive the speed limit, except when driving exes home from the airport, but I keep both hands on the wheel at all times.
Curling Red River Shootout
1 year ago
by integgroll
in Curling
Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas (technically Farmers Branch). A short 45 minute drive from my home. I am very biased since this is my home club, but I love this building. It has an upstairs viewing area that has a bar attached, they just so happen to carry Shiner Boch on tap too. The ice this weekend wasn’t the best, however we were not on the rink that we are usually on, so any home rink advantage that the DFW players would have had was gone.
The Friday night before the Curling Red-River Shootout begins there is a party over on my side of town. Food, your choice of drinks (that you bring). It was at this party that we were supposed to learn who we were curling with over the weekend. And the news came, Oklahoma didn’t have enough players. I, along with a couple others, had been moved to the other side.
Saturday morning, the first set of games to be played is the regular games, worth 16 points in total. OKC wins 12 of them (DFW 4/ OKC12) After the first round the guy who has the Oklahoma Curling Club t-shirts in his car gets off the ice and I quickly convince him to sell me one so that I can be in uniform with the rest of their players. Then in the next round where I am playing they do the same right back to us OKC 4 and DFW 12, (16/16) Next there is a skills competition consisting of the following
- Draw to the button
- Hit and Roll
- Draw through a port (gigantic one)
- Raise
- Double Takeout (one right behind the other)
The first round of the skills goes alright for both teams, with it being DFW 9 to OKC 7 in the first round (25/23) and then in the next round things went in our favor a bit more with OKC scoring 10 and DFW only 6 (31/33) And now it was time for doubles, something many of us have no idea how to play, and certainly have no idea at all how the strategy is different than normal curling. However I found the doubles very fun, even if I did have to wait a whole 6 hours to play my round of them.
The doubles rounds went like this:
- DFW 4 OKC 4 (35/37)
- DFW 6 OKC 2 (41/39)
- DFW 4 OKC 4 (45/43)
- DFW 1 OKC 7 (46/50) <-my draw
So coming out of the first day of curling the OKC team was a whole 4 points ahead, however this didn’t mean too much because on Sunday there was the skins games, and that is where the *real* points are at.Sunday morning, luckily I had the later draw for skins, so I was able to sleep in a bit. So I missed about the first hour of the game on Sunday. However when I arrived it was not looking good for the Oklahoma folks. they were behind in almost every game, and not exactly happy looking. The games ended with a very biased lead to the DFW side, 41 DFW 23 OKC (87/73) OKC went from a 4 point lead to a 14 point loss in one game.
Before stepping on the ice though we made sure to clear our heads and get ready to have some fun as usual. My game goes really quickly, and we have a good game, winnind all of our skins but one. After we are done I start looking around to see how everyone else is doing and to find out if we still have a chance, our game alone almost recovered our point detriment.
After crunching a few numbers in my head, I found that we were doing alright, and we were still in this despite our massive point debt going into the round. finally one of the games ends in OKC’s favor and then the other is pretty much tied.
Finally it comes down to the last game on the ice. Everyone is watching intently waiting for the game to end so that the totals can be tallied and the winner declared. I am crunching numbers in my head once again, trying to figure out how the last two ends needed to go to determine the winner. It was all on this team at this point. The last game finally ends about 15 minutes after the other game and the total of the round is 19 DFW 46 OKC.
For those of you doing your math as you have been going on you know what the final score is already. But for those of you who have not, you will just have to finish this sentence, and the next one. The total scores of the weekend ended up being 106 Dallas/Fort Worth, which is a very sizeable score and a tough one to beat, with the slight exception of the 119 points that Oklahoma earned, making them the winners of the first Curling Red river Bonspiel!
Congratulations Oklahoma! and all of the people who were handed over to the Oklahoma team and fought for the win. I would like to say thank you to all of the people who were involved in making it happen, you guys were awesome the entire time and really made a wonderful bonspiel happen. I would also like to thank the Dr. Pepper Stars Center and its employees who without you guys it wouldn’t have been possible to have this at all, much less our curling league. I also apologize for those of you who were not invited to play, I will make sure personally that it doesn’t happen again.
And here is a picture of about half of the winners of the bonspiel! (If you aren’t in the picture, send me a picture of yourself and I will add you in)
