I engineered my career to give me the adventurous life I always wanted – Quartz

The problem with the “Work hard play hard” mindsetOne of the most bizarre parts about going to law school is that you and most your friends go from starving students to well-off lawyers basically overnight. When I was working for the law firm, I was making enough money to do whatever recreational activities I wanted. I ate at the trendy new restaurants in DC, drank all the specialty cocktails I could handle, and never turned down the opportunity to show up an hour late to some concert as the loser still wearing business-casual attire. It turns out that “work hard, play hard” is a horribly inefficient way to get enjoyment out of life. I was living the classic “work hard play hard” lifestyle. But it turns out that’s a horribly inefficient way to get enjoyment out of life. Unless you truly love your job, the “work hard” part means you’re losing out on a lot of time when you could be doing something you care about. And the “play hard” part winds up feeling empty, because you’re trying to compensate for all that lost time.Once I started focusing on the question of how I wanted to spend time, and with whom, the answers unfolded naturally. While I was on my road trip, a friend from college asked if I wanted to help him get some chocolate made as holiday gifts for our friends and family. Neither of us knew anything about chocolate. But we wanted to go to Nicaragua. It seemed like as good a reason as any to go explore the jungle down there.

Source: I engineered my career to give me the adventurous life I always wanted – Quartz
 
Recent information suggests that I may have to find the strength to do what this guy did.

The Dado Banatao Story

Background[edit]

Banatao was born on May 23, 1946 in Malabbac, Iguig, Cagayan, Philippines. His father, Salvador Banatao, was a rice farmer. His mother, Rosita Banatao, was a housekeeper.[2]
Banatao is known for his rags to riches story. During his childhood, he walked barefoot on a dirt road just to reach Malabbac Elementary School. He pursued his secondary education at the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Tuguegarao. After high school, he pursued hisBachelor of Science in Electric Engineering from the Mapúa Institute of Technology and graduated cum laude.[4][5]
After college, he turned down several job offers, including one from Meralco. He joined Philippine Airlines as a trainee pilot, and was later pirated by Boeing. At Boeing, he worked as a design engineer for the company’s new commercial airliner and cargo transport aircraft, Boeing 747, in the United States. With the opportunity to stay in the United States, he then took his Master of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University and finished in 1972.[2][6] Banatao also joined the Homebrew Computer Club, where he met Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.[7]
After finishing his master’s degree, Banatao worked with different technology companies such as the National Semiconductor,Intersil, and Commodore International where he designed the first single chip, 16-bit microprocessor-based calculator.[2] In 1981, he developed the first 10-Mbit Ethernet CMOS with silicon coupler data-link control and transreceiver chip while working in Seeq Technology. He was also credited for the firstsystem logic chip set for IBM‘s PC-XT and the PC-AT; the local bus concept and the first Windows Graphics accelerator chip for personal computers.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dado_Banatao

Impress Your Coworkers by Using SQL UNPIVOT!

This is a nice guide on Pivot and UnPivot usage for real problems:

 
I’ve recently encountered a very interesting question on Stack Overflow by an unnamed user. The question was about generating a table of the following form in Oracle, using a table valued function:

Description   COUNT
-------------------
TEST1         10
TEST2         15
TEST3         25
TEST4         50

The logic that should be implemented for the COUNT column is the following:

  • TEST1: count of employees whose sal < 10000
  • TEST2: count of employees whose dept > 10
  • TEST3: count of employees whose hiredate > (SYSDATE-60)
  • TEST4: count of employees whose grade = 1

Challenge accepted!
 
Source: Impress Your Coworkers by Using SQL UNPIVOT!

Awesome Windows Utility: Ditto

Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to specify what gets saved, text, images or html.
 

Features

  • Easy to use interface
  • Search and paste previous copy entries
  • Keep multiple computer’s clipboards in sync
  • Data is encrypted when sent over the network
  • Accessed from tray icon or global hot key
  • Select entry by double click, enter key or drag drop
  • Paste into any window that excepts standard copy/paste entries
  • Display thumbnail of copied images in list
  • Full Unicode support(display foreign characters)
  • UTF-8 support for language files(create language files in any language)
  • Uses sqlite database (www.sqlite.org)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ditto-cp/
Jetbrains Idea IntelliJ  has this clipboard that you can use in all the various windows of IntelliJ this is incredibly useful and you activate this with shortcut key CTL-SHIFT-V to paste from this clipboard.
I’ve grown so accustomed to this that I tried searching for a similar addon/program/widget to windows, luckily found Ditto.
Ditto is more than a clipboard because it allows you to copy not only picture and text but also files. Ditto is reasonably fast and it  is even opensource (based only on being hosted on sourceforge).
Do yourself a favor and install Ditto on your windows PC.
 
 

Grails + Jenkins + GitHub = WIN

Found slides to this very useful talk about Grails + Jenkins + GitHub.
This is very useful because it allows one to approximate the Git-Deploy features one gets accustomed to when deploying in heroku or openshift.

 

GVM becomes SDKMAN

I haven’t been programming in grails lately so this comes as a surprise.
 
I am trying to learn the innards of google cloud compute engine, although we’ve used it as a test server for our previous grails project I wasn’t involved in setting it up (perks of having a geeky CTO).
 
Was happily using GVM since last year and was surprised that it wasn’t working.
it seems the new website for gvm is:

http://sdkman.io/

The new command would either be:

curl -s http://get.sdkman.io | bash

curl  –ipv4- -s http://get.sdkman.io | bash

PS: May post about setting up an instance with ubuntu java grails in google cloud compute

rePost:: Why Neri Does NOT DESERVE A SENATE SEAT:Mar, Wharton and our culture of stupidity | Inquirer Opinion

Self-styled activists routinely spout nonsense before our Supreme Court, then puff up at the press conference afterwards. A leftist congressman attacked our cybercrime law’s validity yet, when questioned during the oral arguments, informed justices that he was not familiar with the Internet. He did the same when he attacked our electricity law. This was never reported

Source: Mar, Wharton and our culture of stupidity | Inquirer Opinion
 
The leftist congressman being referred to was Congressman Neri Colmenares.  I respect activism. I do not respect activism without intellectual rigor.

On Turf, U.S. Women Dig in Their Cleats at Last – The New York Times

“We have become so accustomed to playing on whatever surface is put in front of us,” the team wrote in an open letter posted Monday on The Players’ Tribune. “But we need to realize that our protection — our safety — is priority No. 1.”Good for them. With their stock and their visibility as high as it has ever been, the players realized that there has never been a better time to find their voices.So goalkeeper Hope Solo shared a photo with her one million Twitter followers and forward Alex Morgan, who battled a leg injury for much of the past year, grumbled publicly about the “horrible” conditions. Morgan even told Fox Sports that she now encourages her teammates to speak their minds and ask “whether we should be playing on it if the men wouldn’t be playing on it.”

Source: On Turf, U.S. Women Dig in Their Cleats at Last – The New York Times

Musing 2015 12 08 0228H : Solution to Crime

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1594064447540005/permalink/1649722938640822/?comment_id=1649741978638918&notif_t=group_comment
Giancarlo Angulo Improve Community Policing by building real communities and making members responsible for each other

Giancarlo Angulo
Giancarlo Angulo Eliminate extreme poverty. Nobody should ever be hungry

Giancarlo Angulo
Giancarlo Angulo Create a Drug treatment program with community support

Giancarlo Angulo
Giancarlo Angulo Install CCTV everywhere and monitor

Giancarlo Angulo
Giancarlo Angulo National ID

Giancarlo Angulo
Giancarlo Angulo BAN GUNS. If you have a gun then SWAT will be called to deal with you. Otherwise even patrolmen should not be allowed to carry guns

Giancarlo Angulo
Giancarlo Angulo There is no one solution. There is a list of solutions that if done concurrently will reduce crime to tolerable levels.