Mahboob's Journal

During my recent wanderings, I faced a mathematical problem which had to be solved by a Java program. The problem is: You are given a number n. Find the smallest number N, which is divided by n, with the condition that N should have only 0s and 1s.

As a software developer or architect, you would have encountered and used NoSQL. Even if you haven't used it, it is good to have the basics of NoSQL and MongoDB at your fingertips. A couple of times, I faltered while discussing NoSQL / MongoDB. Hence this compilation of basic points, as a ready reference.

I have written the Ruby version of the programs in the online book "A Programmer's Guide To Data Mining". The book's website is http://guidetodatamining.com/ . This is my first small step into the world of analytics and now I feel I am a member of the exclusive Numerati club. Though the book is on data mining, it is a good entry level resource for machine learning. It simplifies and de-mystifies data analytics for the programmer using Python examples. I translated the programs into Ruby for my own learning, as well as for further simplification and de-mystification with easy language idioms.

Preface To me, the best programmers are empty cups, who constantly explore new technology (noSQL, node.js, whatever) with open minds. Mediocre programmers have surrounded their minds with cities of delusion -- C++ is good, Java is bad, PHP is the only way to do web programming. MySQL is the only database to consider. My hope is that you will find some of the ideas in this book valuable and I ask that you keep a beginner's mind when reading it. As Shunryu Suzuki says:

During the past weeks, I was reading up, and learning from the online book, A Programmer's Guide to Data Mining by Ron Zacharski. The website is http://guidetodatamining.com/

After waddling through a lot of Java code during the week, I decided to unwind in the weekend with Ruby code. And a favourite pastime is to convert Python code to Ruby code. I took one program, Dendrogram drawing -- a Python recipe, from the site code.activestate.com . What the program does is, to "Print dendrogram of a binary tree. Each tree node is represented by a length-2 tuple." When I read it first time, I too didn't understand fully as to what it does. In order to spare some of you the same agony, let's break down the quoted objective into key terms and get their meanings.

In this post, I discuss three Ruby idioms I wrote as equivalents for Python code snippets that I had come across.