"Pluggin' the hole " day

Take a day a week to complete least important, someday-maybe-later, low priority tasks. Go for quantity instead of quality. Do as quick as possible, multitask. Clean all of your inboxes, todo-lists. Get rid of the cluttering tasks. Old bills? Throw away papers? Unpleasant calls? Plug all the leaks to get more focused on what's important tommorrow.

Simple dictionary quicksort in Python

Bloody simple and quick algorithm to sort items. I used it to sort dictionary elements by values, so pass .items() as the parameters

Simple log using Python and Google Spreadsheets

gspread can be installed from PyPI (easy_install gspread OR pip install gspread). To make it work you should fill in your Google credentials, and create a spreadsheet named LOG in your Google Docs account

Scherer's typology of affective states

Classifying human's affective states is a quite tough problem. Recently I've discovered  some splendid methods invented by Dr. Klaus Scherer,  director of Swiss Center for Affective Sciences. The first way of classification implies two-dimensional space based on activity and evaluation axes, as shown below.

A more detailed approach splits all the affective states into  five categories:  Emotion, Mood, Interpersonal Stances,  Attitudes, and Personality Traits.

Emotion:  Is the episode  relatively brief  of  synchronized  responses  for  all  or  most  organic  systems to the evaluation of  an  external  or internal  event  as  being of  major  significance.  Emotion’s  examples  are anger, sadness, joy, fear, shame, pride, elation and desperation.

Mood: Is a diffuse affective state that consists in the subjective feeling changing, with low intensity, but long duration without apparent cause. Dipert (1998) considers that moods differ from emotions most strongly in not  having  an intentional  object. Their  causes  are typically  conceptual  or  evaluative  (things  are  or  are  not going  well).  He  mentions some examples  of  moods:  cheerful,  gloomy,  irritable,  listless,  de-pressed,  and buoyant.

Interpersonal Stance: The interpersonal  stance is an affective position in  relation to the other person in  a specific interaction. Distant, cold, warm, supportive and contemptuous are examples of interpersonal stances.

Attitudes:  Attitudes  are  relatively  tolerant,  affectively  coloured beliefs,  preferences  and predisposition  in relation to objects or people. Examples of attitudes are liking, loving, hating, desiring and valuing

Personality Traits:  Personality  traits  are emotionally  laden,  stable  personality  dis-positions  and behavior tendencies,  typical  of  a  person.  For  example:  nervous,  anxious,  reckless,  morose,  hostile,  envious  and jealousy.

Sources: 

[1] http://www-lipn.univ-paris13.fr/~genereux/pub_fichiers/SS0603GenereuxM.pdf

[2]  http://www.info2.uqam.ca/~nkambou_r/DIC9340/seances/seance9/pedagogicalAgents/its_w7_elisa_eduardo.pdf

It is so difficult to find the Flow

(diagram by  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

Merge Livejournals

Got too many livejournal accounts? Nice python utility LJMigrate can help you quickly. Just write from and to accounts, run ljmigrate.py and -- here you go, you have one place for all

Online classes I currently take

I am fond of Stanford's online classes appeared after ai-class.org project. Now I am going through Udacity's CS101 Building Search Engine taught by David Evans, Natural Language Processing by Dan Jurafsky and Chris Manning, as well as Chuck Eesley's Venture Lab devoted to Technology Enterpreneurship.
All of these classes include - video lectures, online quizzes and homeworks. Udacity class is perfect for beginners in programming and computer science. It tells what a computer is , what is memory, what is gigahertz, how to write simple code in Python, how to build different data structures and so on. I like that this is a goal-driven course - and you'll get your own web search engine by the end of this class. The second, NLP class, has been delayed twice for about two months, but finally it has started. There's also python homeworks there, but the most valuable is good theoretical review on language modelling and focusing on building of simple, but working applications - data-scraping, language-modelling and so on. The latter class has not started yet, but Chuck promises a lots of teamwork and practical assignments for the future brins and zuckerbergs.

Leo Babauta's Focus

If you want to build your own personal productivity system, there's another good book to read : "Focus. A simplicity manifesto in the age of distraction".  Leo promotes minimalism for several years in his Zenhabits blog. This book is mostly about creating simple, distraction-free single-tasking, goal-free, effortless environment and habits. I love the idea of information cleansing and building relevant information stream. I doubt if 118 pages is the simplest and least way to describe such things, but the book definitely worth reading. Or skimming, at least

New productivity system: Getting Results (the Agile Way)

Getting Results is an awesome productivity system for hard infoworkers from the Microsoft guy J.D. Meier . It is simple, focused, principle-driven, bringing best software agile pm practices for the personal efficiency

Command-Line Google

Just found GoogleCL to access Google services (e.g. blogger, calendar, docs, contacts) from command line. Written in Python

New post

Building my search engine