Month: February 2019

Using Docker – First Steps

Welcome back! In this post I will cover my experience going over chapter 3 “First Steps” from the book “Using Docker” by Adrian Mouat published by O’REILLY. It is a fact that when you read a technical book you will not be able to learn as much as if you spend the time in front of a computer experimenting and making mistakes.

In this post I will cover some of my experimentation with the concepts presented in the third chapter of the book. If you are reading this post, I strongly recommend reading the third chapter, then experiment with the concepts and finally go over this post. You never know which things you might have missed to understand by only reading. Continue reading “Using Docker – First Steps”

Checking Docker Installation on Linux

I am starting some work using Docker containers and as usual I like to spend some time refreshing and checking all is well before starting the actual development. Such approach seems to allow me to catch up issues before they cause bugs during the software development cycle.

Last year I wrote a post with the instructions I followed while installing Docker on my CentOS 7 Linux machine. If you are about to install Docker, their website appears to have up to data instructions for different operating systems. Continue reading “Checking Docker Installation on Linux”

Logistic Regression with a Neural Network mindset

It is a very snowy day in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Schools are closed due to the amount of snow and low visibility. It started snowing earlier this morning and according to forecast, it should end around 09:00 PM this evening. We have already surpassed the snow amount for February according to records that go back over a century. We will be receiving more snow in the upcoming days. Will see if we set other new records.

In this post I will cover a logistic regression implementation used to determine if pictures contain a cat or not. The code is based on an edited assignment for Coursera Neural Networks and Deep Learning. Continue reading “Logistic Regression with a Neural Network mindset”

Game of Thrones – I

It is almost time to complete the first 2-hour block of the day. I work using a technique called Deep Work. Today I got up at 05:00 AM and have been at it for about two hours. I believe I have enough time to complete this post.

I received an email message from HackerRank with the Game of Thrones – 1 challenge. The challenge is simple. We have to determine if a string of characters may be converted to a palindrome or not. Keep in mind that palindromes longer than one character are made up of pairs of characters. Continue reading “Game of Thrones – I”

Highest Value Palindrome

Woke up around 04:10 AM and decided to go back to sleep. Later I got up at 05:00 AM. Seems like another cold morning in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. The skies were clear and it seems we have a full moon.

Yesterday I worked on the Highest Value Palindrome challenge at HackerRank. I was able to complete it but did not have time to generate a post. Hopefully it will be done in an hour or so. Continue reading “Highest Value Palindrome”

Mars Exploration

Last Friday I received a message on my Google Gmail account. I just read the first line without opening the message. The message required me to select a date and time for this week. I decided that due to the amount of messages that I receive everyday and that it was Friday afternoon, I would answer it first thing Monday (today).

This morning I looked for the message and I could not find it. I looked in the trash and deleted folders with the same result. I did a Google search to see if there is a feature in Gmail to send a message and if the receiver does not reply within a specified time period, you would be able to automatically delete it. I was not able to find such feature. Hopefully the person that sent it will be kind enough to resend when they do not receive a reply from me.

OK, let’s look at this HackerRank challenge. Moving forward will try to pick up problems with higher difficulty level. Continue reading “Mars Exploration”

Making Anagrams

I received a practice message from Hacker Rank. I like the idea to be reminded to spend some time practicing to solve a problem that is completely apart from the things I do at work or are in my learning schedule. The topic of the challenge is anagrams. You can find the description here.

After reading the description a couple times, it seems that the task is to remove characters from the two strings until we end up with two anagrams. In the example we end up with “a” as a string. Not much of an anagram. The goal is to return the number of characters removed from both strings. Continue reading “Making Anagrams”

Funny String

It is Sunday in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul and it is starting to snow. The forecast calls for snow turning into rain. Later this morning my wife and I are going to the Mall of America (MOA) for a walk. It beats getting on exercise equipment at home and watching TV.

I selected the Funny String practice from HackerRank. Given a string one has to reverse the characters and place them in a second string. Then traverse both comparing the absolute differences among consecutive characters. If the differences match then the function should return the string “Funny”; otherwise it should return “Not Funny”. Continue reading “Funny String”