In these posts I’m studying the book Practical Common Lisp by Peter Siebel and coding the examples in Clojure. Aim: studying clojure and reading this fantastic book can be accessed online here. In part 1 of this post, we went through creating a single database using list and maps. Chapter 3 continued Looking at database contents In this section, Peter teaches string formatting for CL. Using string formatting, a nicer way to look at db contents is tried.
In these posts I’m studying the book Practical Common Lisp by Peter Siebel and coding the examples in Clojure. Aim: studying clojure and reading this fantastic book can be accessed online here. Chapter 3 of the book We try to implement a simple database for storing information about CDs that we own. CD & Records First decision is how do you store the details for a single CD. Peter says that we (for now) want to store 4 properties about a CD.
When you are working with a task where you are interactively building a solution, you need a lot of focus. Most of the work that I do fits into this category. Interactively building solutions to larger problems by solving smaller problems is pioneered by data first tools like Clojure and R. The first step to achieving the focus required in such interactive work is to remove distractions and complexities from your environments as much as possible.
I read ‘the checklist manifesto’ by Atul Gawande. I am a firm believer in books and advice in general from anyone in practice oriented profession: doctors, investors (not speculators), pilots and so on. The professinals in these fields have generally a large skin in the game (money, reputation, their own life), making their advice worthy as compared to academic advise. The checklist book was then just the right fit for a lazy afternoon reading at once.
Some time back, I wrote my Emacs configuration in an org mode file. The whole setup is documented here. The objective was twofold: one to make it readable to my dumb brain when I open it six months later, second was to make it reproducible on another machine quickly. Say, if something unforseen was to happen to my good ol Dell Vostro machine, what with the configuration safe on Github and all that, I can have my new machine with the Emacs setup very fast and without splitting hair.
This is just a first post on this blog. Hello, world!
I have been working with Unix (Linux to be precise) command line since a long time. But I had always avoided learning about Unix power tools like awk, sed. Quick exploratory analysis of data in a tabular/csv form is daily routine for me. My tool of choice for this work is either R or Python. I used to wonder about the utility of tool like awk. But recently I found myself using awk for some specific use cases.