clog

Classifying colleagues has been one of my favorite activities. I can safely say the same for almost everyone around me. Here is an old one.

This time, my parameters are facts and logic. To elaborate, there will be people who can be trusted for their facts and those who can be trusted for their logic. Adding a layer of abstraction, you have people who can be trusted for their Information (fact). And there are people who can be trusted for their judgment (logic).

Using the quadrant theory, I have 4 categories:
I+J+: Industry movers(can fit anywhere, but will rise sooner than you think)
I-J+: Great Leaders (with good I+J- or I+J+ around)
I+J-: Great Workers (with any of the above around)
I-J-: :(

Where do you fit in?

I wrote this one around 2.5 years back. I wasn't clogging then. It follows a brute force approach to solve a sudoku and hence may take substantial amount of time (15+ minutes in some cases) and processing power for tough ones. It first fills all the straight forward ones, fixes those values and then goes on to check all the possible combinations for remaining values.

The algorithm can be improved by widening the scope of the "straight forward fills". However, I haven't done anything more on it than what I did the first time (doesn't that always happen?)

Link

Almost everyone knows this puzzle:

"teetar ke aage do teetar, teetar ke peechhe do teetar, bolo kul kitne teetar"
(Two birds on the left of the bird, two birds on the right, how many birds in all are there?)

Translation changed the front and back part to left and right just to simplify the translation :-)

The most common answer that a person jumps at is "5". Well, popularly the answer is not correct. The right answer is 3. The catch is that the teetars (bird) referred in the two clauses are different and hence the twist.

However, I feel thats not completely right, the minmum possible number is 3 but anything greater than that is as true. I know this is a silly one, but couldn't resist putting it up.

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20071101/how-hard-could-it-be-five-easy-ways-to-fail.html?partner=fogcreek

This started with identifying possible scenarios for something that we needed to test. Here is the gist of the problem.

There are 5 parameters and each parameter has a list of possible values. Generate all the possible cases. Plain old combination.

The first solution that someone followed was to generate the list manually :-). So, I tried and improved it by hardcoding a fixed number of "for" loops for the number of possible values(number of values were fixed too). But then I decided I will roll it out to others and thats when I thought of all the questions that people might ask. So, I realized, not making it general is too lame a solution. So, here it is, a general solution for generating combinations, of course there are upper limits to the number of combinations it can handle due to the limit excel has for data.

Please read the disclaimer before using it. Any constructive comments are welcome!

Link to the excel

The subject reads - "This is a quiz" reversed. Steven Kryskalla got 3 (and almost got the 4th) and jsn got all of them with few insights on the questions as well :-).
Here is the deciphered post with comments inline in italics and clues in bold.

If you got the subject of this post and if you are able to read this then you would have guessed what this post is going to be about. Well, to clarify just in case, this is going to be a ciphered quiz. The cipher can be different for all the questions. So make no assumptions. Here you go starting with the rotten one

1. What does PDF stand for? If you could read the specific one, get ready for a more general one, key lies in my name
Answer is "Portable Document Format" and the next cipher is Caesar's cipher with Key D (4)

2.Who said this - give me a lever large enough, and I will move the earth? If you could read this your TRAIN is on track for the THIRD one.
Answer is Archimedes (jsn made a comment though about this not being true). The next cipher is Rail Fence Cipher with 3 rails

3.Which animal is the vehicle of lord kamadeva (God of love in Hindu mythology)? The last one is a trip back to where we started.
Parrot. The last question is just reversed

4. What is the name of Stephen Hawking's medical condition
amyotrophic lateral sclerosis

An unexamined clog isn't worth clogging is how Socrates would have put it. So, here you have a clog about a clog - Metaclog. For those who don't know the Meta prefix, here is a slightly confusing explaination.

Metadata is data about data. Which leaves us with two possible interpretation of the meaning of Meta. MetaX can be X about X OR data about X. In any case Metaclog will mean the same thing.

Few things that I have tried to change consciously in my approach to clogging.

- size of the clog
- frequency of the clog

I feel smaller and more frequent clogs may be more effective in getting readers (if that is what the clog aims at) as opposed to otherwise. I believe this should happen due to the ADD syndrome that most of us suffer from today. We tend to have a short focus span. We seem to look at lot of things for small periods of time and more often than not repeatedly look at the same things. In effect we might end up spending good amount of times on those frequent things.

However, all said and done, the content is obviously more important. When I started the clog I started with an assumption of no readers which has been almost true so far. But my belief was pleasantly shaken when I got a few comments on my post ziuq-si-siht, people not only read but responded to the post.

Well, in keeping with the spirit of keeping it short, I close this one here and move on to writing my next entry :-)

Travelling across time zones can be quite painful. However, I figured a positive side to it recently. With all things constant, I tend to push my schedule, pushing my sleeping time further daily. It sometimes works well to reset it by complete disruption. I realised this is true for all things that fall in routine, they deteriorate. A routine disruption to routine may be a welcome thing.

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