DadOverflow.com

Musings of a dad with too much time on his hands and not enough to do. Wait. Reverse that.

Month: June 2018 (Page 1 of 3)

Don’t forget about Linux on Windows

June 30, 2018 /

I love articles on “Top X tools for…whatever”.  Recently, I was reading an article on essential tools for data scientists.  Tool #1: wget.  I’ve used wget in the past at work and suddenly realized I actually had a need for wget at home.  Unfortunately, wget is a tool for Linux operating systems, not Windows, the system I typically use at home.  What to do?  I’ve been using Git Bash quite a bit lately and that shell includes several Linux utilities.  Maybe it has wget?  No dice.  You can add more utilities to Git Bash, but I wonder if there’s a better solution.

Again at work I occasionally use Cygwin and was just about to download it to my home workstation when I suddenly said to myself, “Self, you silly goose!  Microsoft just released a Linux sub-system for Windows!  Why don’t you install that?”  So, that’s what I did!

Step 1: Enable the Linux Subsystem

Obviously, you’ll want to make sure you’re version of Windows 10 supports the Linux subsystem.  If it does, fire up a PowerShell command shell as Administrator.  The easiest way to do that is to right-click on your Start Menu icon on your taskbar.  A context menu will pop up with the option Windows PowerShell (Admin).  In the shell, execute this statement:



1
Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName Microsoft-Windows-Subsystem-Linux

Step 2: Install the Linux “app” of your choosing

I rarely use the Windows Store, but once you enable your system to support the Linux sub-system, you’ll have to jump into the store and install the particular flavor or flavors of Linux you prefer.  Yes, that’s right: apparently you can install more than one flavor of Linux.  HowToGeek.com has a detailed article on installing the Linux app from the Windows Store that I highly recommend.  I was particularly excited to see Kali Linux as an option!

Note well: It seems like Microsoft recommends not letting Windows software interact with files you manage in you Linux sub-system.  For my immediate purposes, I simply wanted to download some web resources with wget.  I would, though, like to read that downloaded content in one of my Windows browsers, but where the heck are those files?

To find your home directory in your Linux sub-system, follow these steps:

  1. Open Windows Explorer, and drop this in the address bar: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Packages
  2. That takes you to a directory of installed packages.  Find the directory of the Linux sub-system you installed (hint: the folder should start with the name of the distribution like “KaliLinux” and the timestamp of the folder should match the date and time you installed the sub-system).
  3. Double-click into the appropriate Linux folder then navigate to LocalState\rootfs\home and look for your user.

Now, you have access to the folders and files you created in your home directory.  Again, though, treat those resources with kid gloves.

So now you have wget and a host of other cool Linux tools all on Windows!

 

Exploring chess tournament results

June 26, 2018 /

Back in March, my son competed in the 2018 Queen City Classic Chess Tournament. The tournament coordinators graciously provided the player results online, although those files no longer appear on the site. At the time, I posted on the challenge of downloading the match results and parsing the values. After that, I had intended to do some exploratory data analysis (EDA) on the data and, ideally, see what sort of machine learning models I might want to build against the data.

Well, I did do some EDA work, but since grew a little restless and moved on to other projects; so, I want to go ahead and publish the little bit of work I did do on the data. Maybe next year, I’ll get to more interesting data modeling.

The tournament was composed of 699 players from 134 teams. Kindergarteners through high school 12th graders competed. Rated and non-rated players competed. Here’s a visual of that distribution across the grades:

The largest team, Detroit City Chess Club, brought almost 100 players! Here’s a look at the top 10 largest teams:

The average team size, though, was 5.2 players:

There were 14 competition categories by age and rated and non-rated. Dragon Chess Center dominated most categories:

That’s all I’ll post here, but be sure to check out the notebook I put together that has a lot more analysis.

How to get your child into the World Cup

June 23, 2018 /

The 2018 World Cup is in full swing and my DVR is overflowing with games to watch.  I enjoy regular season soccer and certainly enjoy watching the big tournaments, especially the World Cup.

Despite playing for several years, my son has not shown much interest in watching the professionals; however, this World Cup, he’s starting to join in the frenzy, if ever so slightly.  I think some of his new found enthusiasm is due to the World Cup sticker album we purchased for him.

Available on Amazon, the standard set comes with a book and a box of 650 stickers.  The stickers are mostly individual photos of the players.  The idea is that you open each, individually wrapped sticker, find the player’s country and location on the page and affix the sticker to that spot.  It seems like a great way to get acquainted with the teams and individual players.

Of course, there are over 700 participants in the World Cup, so your box of stickers won’t have all the players you need.  Plus, you tend to get duplicates–we had about 40 duplicate players in our first box.  In theory, my boy’s friends have their own sets, have different duplicates, and then trade their duplicates with one another in order to complete their sets.  In practice, none of his friends have these sets so we bought him another box that will hopefully include the remaining stickers he needs.

As we watch the games, he will look up each team and the players in order to better identify them on the field.  He will also record the game scores in the schedule included in the book.

Overall, I think this set has provided an effective way for my son to enjoy the games and participate at some level.  Plus, years from now, the book should hold warm memories of the times we all gathered as a family to enjoy the 2018 World Cup.

« Older posts

© 2024 DadOverflow.com

Theme by Anders Noren — Up ↑