Colin's Notes

Introduction [Read More]

The U.S. Postal Service is required to fund itself by charging for services like a private business. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak mail volume has dropped by more than half, severely undercutting its budget. [Read More]

As you begin to handle Parquet data with tools in more than one framework and language you’ll probably wonder how all these related pieces fit together. Here is a summary of data formats, libraries and frameworks you will encounter when working with Parquet data and Spark. [Read More]

The book recommendations list has moved to sfworthreading.com. It’s a static site built with Jekyll and a Ruby “updater” script I wrote to do some busy work for me that Jekyll won’t, like building a custom authors index. [Read More]

Changing the default Notepad++ theme doesn’t change most of the colors in a Markdown document. This is especially apparent when using a dark-mode Notepad++ style and dark theme in Windows. You have to manually edit a special Markdown theme to change most of the colors and fonts. [Read More]

Following the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report this spring we’ve heard lots of interpretations of the report offered that can’t survive even a casual reading. [Read More]

Apache Spark, Python and Pandas, Columnar data formats, migrating away from Excel: It’s essential you get familiar with these topics if you’re beginning to grapple with challenging amounts of data. Before immediately jumping to the conclusion that “The Cloud” is the only next step– and getting lost in studying all the services out there – consider what you can do on your own laptop. Good data engineering will take you far. This post is an abbreviated version of three detailed articles I posted last year on the ISRDI Tech Blog. [Read More]

Yesterday I went looking for free historical data for small cap companies only to find the Yahoo! Finance API had been turned off more than a year ago. Hmm, well on to Google Finance then… also turned off their API sometime in 2018. Darn, this was supposed to be a quick project. [Read More]

A few years ago I fasted every other day for a month to try out a human version of an experiment involving rats, to see if doing so would improve my vision. Read full details and results. [Read More]

Can change in diet or restricted eating / fasting effect human brain plasticity? [Read More]