Fun week! Halloween, more DevOps stuff, JSON vs XML, cool electronics and Pies!!

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I’ve been having trouble keeping myself motivated to work on my side projects. I am not sure if I’d call this a slump but it feels very close to one. During my time at the LL4MA Lab, I went through a similar phase. I was stuck on the same problem for a long time and losing motivation to do any work. My advisor, Dr. Hermans, asked me to write a status update at the end of everyday of all the things I worked on. The idea was that I would be able to look back at this at the end of the week and realize that my time was productive and to keep me motivated.

I have decided to start this process again. This will hopefully serve as a documentation of my work as well as help me realize all the things I have accomplished over the week.

I will create a post every Sunday and fill it up over the week. I decided to call this Captain’s log inspired by Star Trek. I will write a more detailed post on Captain’s log and stardates at a later time.

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I am currently using an MSYS2 installation instead of Git for Windows. I chose MSYS2 because it comes with pacman and am able to use other familiar tools like vim, awk and grep. I noticed that my MSYS2 startup is really slow. Googling it brought up the above link which explains the problem is a great detail and gives you a good solution. I am posting the link here for reference.

1. Create /etc/passwd and /etc/group
2. modify /etc/nsswitch.conf to use only file

This prevents MSYS2 to query Active Directory for login information.

mkpasswd -l -c > /etc/passwd
mkgroup -l -c > /etc/group
sed -i '/^passwd:/ s/.*/passwd:         files/' /etc/nsswitch.conf
sed -i '/^group:/ s/.*/group:          files/' /etc/nsswitch.conf

Sudoku is a simple/easy to define problem. You have a 9 x 9 grid and you have to fill the numbers 1 to 9 in such a way that no number is repeated in any row, column, or sub grid. This problem has been explored by a number of people in a number of different ways. Most popular of them all is Peter Norvig’s Solving Every Sudoku Puzzle.

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