Exploring the NBA

Been trying to do some more data sciencey stuff with NBA data. Created a python script that scrapes data from www.basketball-reference.com/. Here's one that counts the wins and losses of the 2nd game in back-to-backs for the 2013-2014 NBA season of every team. Below is the graph and after the jump is the code.

Twitchy Paint

Created an Android app at the SPARC Hackathon this weekend. I got the category "Accelerometer"  so I made an app that draws by sensing the tilt of your phone or tablet and clears the screen by shaking it. It does some other minor stuff besides that. All the code minus a few minor bug fixes I made after the hackathon is on GitHub and the app can be downloaded from Google Play.

GitHub

Threw a link up to my GitHub page on the sidebar. Also put some repos of old projects up on it.

10,000 Hours

Becoming an expert at a subject has always been a fascinating subject to me. Obviously you have to put in the work and like any skill the more you do it the better you get at it. I had heard the 10000 hour/10 years of silence theory before and after reading this article again I decided to put a plan in motion to put in some hours over the next year to become a better programmer. To figure out how much I can do in a year I did a little math. In a year there are an available 8760 hours. For most people, 2920 of those hours are going to be used for sleeping and another 2080 will be used for work. This leaves you with 3760 to do whatever you please with. My ideal goal would be to put in 1000 hours of programming but that just seems unrealistic (which means I wouldn't hold myself to it) so instead I'm going for half that which is about 10 hours a week. Starting today I am going to start tracking it along with some other stats I have been meaning to track. Most of my plan deals with becoming an expert at Python and doing more statistic/graph oriented projects. Other things include checking out other languages and writing simple programs just to be exposed to them.

TWiki and Variables

TWiki is a flexible, powerful, and easy to use enterprise wiki, enterprise collaboration platform. I had to deal with a little bit and was trying to figure out how to set and use variables. I couldn't find a good tutorial so here is a small write up on using them.


To set a variable it will look like:
%{CALC("$SET(myVariable, value)"}%


To get a variable it will look like:
%{CALC("$GET(myVariable)"}%

Harvard Intro to Computer Science

I enrolled in the Harvard Intro to Computer Science class. Should be cool. Looks like lots of interesting projects with lots of different subjects touched.

Preparing for the SSCP

This Saturday I am taking the Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP) Exam which is pretty much the mini Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP). I was originally going to take the Security+ test, but it ended up my job wouldn't pay for that so instead I ended up with this. Throughout the week I will continue to prepare for the exam and put any useful material I find helpful in preparing as well as update this after I take it to give my perspective on the exam. I have been reading materials and taking practice exams throughout the last month so this is the home stretch for me. Fingers crossed that I'll pass. From what I hear others say about it I hear its a doozy.

***UPDATE***

I passed! Below are some sources that I found helpful. Overall I didn't think it was that tough, but I also have some background in it.

RESOURCES:

ISC2 SSCP Candidate Information Bulletin
This is a handout the ISC2 has of what the exam will be covering. Found it helpful just to review this to match my reading to the area that the exam was going to test on.

SSCP Systems Security Certified Practitioner All-in-One Exam Guide by Darril Gibson
 My biggest resource used. Read this a couple times through and did all the quizzes as well as the Master Exam that you can download with it.

Quizlet, Skillport, any other place that you can get practice questions
One thing that I did that I thought was really helpful is just took as many practice tests as possible to see the most questions. Nothing I saw was a great comparison to the exam I took, but just seeing a bunch of questions and having to answer them helped me greatly in being prepared.