Am Montag in den frühen Morgenstunden haben im Stadtgebiet von Hallein (Tennengau) acht Kamele Reißaus genommen. Die Tiere gingen von einem Zirkusgelände in Richtung Bahnhof. Grund dürfte ein Stromausfall gewesen sein.

Do you feel as though you're in a rut? Does nothing feel engaging or entertaining? When you want to make sure you're still in the right direction and you don't want to settle for a mundane life, you'll discover that you need to start challenging yourself. When you take on a challenge head first, you're forcing yourself to grow. When your self-esteem needs a boost, challenging yourself can help you see yourself in a new light.

Hamburg. German developer 4Players has launched ODIN Rooms, a secure, browser-based, decentralized video conferencing platform designed to challenge industry leaders like Microsoft Teams and Zoom. Aimed at corporations, educational institutions, and non-profits, ODIN Rooms offers easy access through a simple URL, with no need for accounts or app installations, and enhances social messaging with enhanced privacy and crystal-clear audio quality.

• Entry into EC motor manufacturing • Further growth in battery segment • Variety of new battery-operated products for professional and home users

The turkey has been carved, the gifts have been purchased and business owners are ready to celebrate the holiday season reflecting on a successful 2014. While small business owners may be thinking about holiday traditions, they are also beginning to focus on priorities and potential challenges ahead. Changes in technology, growing cybersecurity concerns, and shifts in the political landscape are all top of mind as small business owners enter 2015.

As the clock strikes midnight and the champagne bottles pop to ring in the New Year, three topics will be top of mind for entrepreneurs in 2015.

New Year, New Tools

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The future can look bleak when starting a small business. According to the U.K. Office for National Statistics, six out of ten businesses starting in the U.K. today will not make it to 2020. In the United States things are only marginally better with Small Business Administration research showing two-thirds of new businesses close their doors within the first two years and only about half survive the first five years. This may sound like a depressing number for a small business owner, but you can avoid becoming just another statistic by being aware of the most common small business challenges—and how to handle them.

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There is a convenient narrative about small business that we have all heard a million times.  Small business represents a huge, underserved, and highly lucrative market for finance-oriented entrepreneurs and large organizations alike. The prevailing wisdom is that these businesses run on Intuits QuickBooks, which enables them to have organized, accurate, and timely financial information at their fingertips. By all accounts, the small business market should be an easy one to serve. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Organizations big and small have struggled to serve the small business market in an efficient and effective matter, and it is all due to what we call the 90% challenge.

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A healthy economy means many small businesses are thriving -- but they're also having a hard time hanging onto employees. A good 24% of small businesses lost at least one employee in 2018, while 11% of small businesses lost 10% of their workforce, according to Bank of America. Not only that, but 58% of businesses had trouble finding qualified candidates for open roles, and 25% said it took more time to fill open positions in 2018 than it did in 2017.

And there lies the problem with a strong job market: When employment is plentiful, workers have more options to choose from, so getting them to join or stay with your team becomes more challenging for companies across the board, but particularly for small businesses with limited resources.

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The Python Challenge is a nifty site that presents you with a series of puzzles that it asks you to solve using python; getting each answer allows you to move on to the next puzzle.

Python is a cool language and it's a good tool for this job¹ However, I'm learning clojure right now, so I thought it would be fun to try and solve a few of them in clojure. Here's my answers for challenges 0 thru 4 (warning: if you want to do these puzzles yourself, reading further now might ruin the fun)

Challenge #0 (the "Warmup")

Asks you to solve 2 to the 38th power:

(clojure.contrib.math/expt 2 38)

i.e. just use the exponent function in clojure contrib.

Challenge #1

This one throws some scrambled text at you and a clue on what the key is (ROT 2):

(defn translate [text]
  (let [lookup (vec (map char (range 97 123)))]
    (letfn [(letter? [c] (and (>= (int c) 97) (<= (int c) 122)))
            (shift-2 [c] (mod (+ 2 (- (int c) 97)) 26))]
      (apply str (map #(if (letter? %) (get lookup (shift-2 %)) %) text)))))

Create a lookup table of the chars, a predicate to test if a char is a letter. & a function to get the index of 2nd to next letter (the index loops, essentially making lookup as a ring buffer), then map across the given text, shifting by 2 if its a letter or just returning the char if its not.

Challenge #2

This one throws a big hunk of random data at you and suggests you pick out the 'rare' characters:

(defn filter-file [path]
  (let [fs (line-seq (clojure.contrib.io/reader path))
        lookup (set (map char (range 97 123)))]
    (apply str (mapcat #(filter lookup %) fs))))

A quick visual scan of the text led me to a strong hunch the "rare"² characters were lowercase alpha, so:

Re-use our lookup table from the last challenge; this time make it a set, then use the set to filter each line of the file denoted by 'path' (I first saved the text to a file to make it easier to work with); use mapcat to flatten the lines out (this has the effect of stripping empty lines altogether); apply str to the resulting sequence to get the answer.

Challenge #3

This one's a big hunk of text too, so a quick refactoring of our last solution results in a more abstract (and higher-order) function that takes a filter function as an additional parameter:

(defn filter-file [filter-fn path]
    (apply str (mapcat filter-fn (line-seq (io/reader path)))))

the filter from challenge #2 thus becomes an argument; partial works nicely here:

(filter-file (partial filter (set (map char (range 97 123)))) "path/to/file")

Now we can make a new filter for challenge #3. This one will need to find character patterns that look like this: ABCxDEF. We'll need grab x. This one just screamed regex at me, so here's a filter that gives us the answer:

#(second (re-find #"[^A-Z][A-Z]{3}([a-z])[A-Z]{3}[^A-Z]" %)))

An anonymous function³ that uses re-find to match: "not-cap followed by 3 CAPS followed by not-cap followed by 3 CAPS followed by not-cap"; the second element of the resulting vector (because we use parens to create a group) produces x; mapcat et al do the rest.

Two big assumptions/limitations here: assumes each target is on its own line, and that the target pattern wasn't on the beginning or end of the line (which was good enough to get the answer).

Challenge #4

This challenge requires one to follow a url call chain, passing a different number as the argument to a 'nothing' parameter each time. The resulting page text provides the next number to follow (and/or some noise to keep you on your toes) until eventually we get the answer.

This one gets kinda ugly.

This is the kind of problem scripting languages are made for (e.g. perl, python & ruby coders would all make short work of this problem). Still, it's possible to write procedural code in clojure, and it's still reasonably straightforward.

One decision I had to make is how to GET the url's - my weapon of choice for this sort of thing is clj-http:

(require '[clj-http.client :as client])
(require '[clojure.contrib.string :as string]

(defn follow-chain [base-url number]
  (let [result (:body (client/get (str base-url number)))
        idx (.indexOf result "and the next")]
    (cond
      (re-find #"^Yes" result) (do
                                 (println result)
                                 (follow-chain base-url (/ (Integer/parseInt number) 2)))
      (= -1 idx)               result
      :else                    (let [result-vec (string/split (subs result idx) #" ")
                                     next-number (last result-vec)]
                                 (println result)
                                 (recur base-url next-number)))))

Take the url as a base & the first number to follow; use client-http/get to grab the page; extract the body of the page; get the index of the phrase "and the next" using the java "indexOf" method - we'll use the index later to parse out the end of the text and get the next number...

...unless of course, we get text that tells us something else (like a message saying "Yes" and then instructing us to divide the last number by two and continue on as before) so...

...we set up a switch using the cond macro: If the result starts with "Yes" make a recursive call dividing the last number by two; if indexOf otherwise came up empty, that's our answer, so return it; else pick the next number out of the result by splitting the end of the string into a vector (using clojure.contrib.string/split) and recur (tail recursively call the function again).

The println's could be removed, although they were essential when figuring out what the code needed to do.

Conclusion

This was a fun exercise; clojure's holding up pretty well so far, though clojure would not be my weapon of choice for that last one; if I choose to do the next five, I'll post them in a future article.

Footnotes

Back in 2010, when I was SVP of Social Media at the Advertising Research Foundation, a member in the mobile industry was interested in learning whether the opportunities in digital signage were right for the company to explore. I ended...

In 2024, Libya’s oil industry is navigating a complex landscape marked by both significant challenges and promising opportunities. The Libyan National Oil Corporation (NOC) has set ambitious goals to increase production capacity to two million barrels per day within the next three to five years. Currently, the country produces approximately 1.3 million barrels per day, with plans to boost this by an additional 100,000 barrels per day by the end of the year. Despite these aspirations, Libya’s oil sector continues to grapple with political instability. The country faces ongoing clashes between rival governments, which have historically disrupted oil production and exports. In recent years, these conflicts have led to the shutdown of key oil fields and ports, severely impacting the nation’s oil output and revenues. However, there are signs of recovery and growth. The NOC is preparing to launch its first oil and gas licensing round in nearly two decades, aiming to attract international investment and revitalize exploration activities. This initiative is part of a broader strategy to enhance production and reduce the burning of associated gas by 83% by 2030. Additionally, Libya is making strides in infrastructure development. A notable project is the $600-million oil refinery near the El...

Incredible Black Dodge Challenger Muscle Car #2 Big, Bad, Bold, and Powerful. I'm Loving this Phat Azz American Muscle Car. Copyright 2009 Jimmy Rocker Photography

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One of the biggest events on the Wellington craft beer calendar, Malthouse’s West Coast IPA Challenge, is expanding due to a positive case of growing pains. Colin Mallon, Malthouse Operations Guy and WCIPAC organiser, says this year’s 9th Annual West Coast IPA Challenge (WCIPAC) will expand its festivities to Malthouse’s sister bar, Fork & Brewer on Bond Street, due to increasingly large crowds turning up to see who will win Best West Coast IPA and take home the Golden Gumboots. The annual event, taking place on Friday, 29 July, sees brewers showcase their skills with hops by brewing West Coast IPAs, a […]

There are big opportunities for the music industry in podcasts, but one of the big barriers is licensing: the cost and complexity for podcasters of securing the rights to actually play music in their shows.

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Extensive research, and up-to-date facts about obese children and its health issues. An easy-to-read book with practical advice that can make a difference. Plus free bonus book of hints and tips to improve your child's eating habits.

The grudge-match between AMD and Intel continues - although AMD is the clear aggressor in all of it. This week, in a follow up to AMD's antitrust lawsuit over Intel's "abuse of monopoly power" the guantlet was thrown down for...

“I…think one of us needs to crawl into the delivery truck?” A few minutes earlier, the four of us received a message on our phones from GGC headquarters: go down a particular street, and be on the lookout for a delivery truck. Once there, we should be prepared to open up a cardboard box. The […]

The post Great Gotham Challenge Goes the Extra Mile to Deliver Outdoor Puzzle Hunts first appeared on ARGNet: Alternate Reality Gaming Network.

Cloud computing has driven, and continues to drive, a paradigm shift for enterprise IT. Mastering the cloud has become essential for businesses amp;hellip; but what does that mean, and how can it be achieved? In a recent report titled 'From Taming Cloud Complexity to Achieving Cloud Mastery,'amp;nbsp;EPAM Continuum, the integrated business, technology and experience consulting practice of EPAM Systems, Inc. (NYSE: EPAM),amp;nbsp;answers the most pressing questions on the topic and reveals how to achieve the ultimate goal, mastering cloud complexity.

[Nile Post] Uganda's efforts to combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic have made significant strides, yet crucial gaps remain, particularly in preventing mother-to-child transmission of the virus.

[Lesotho Times] LESOTHO is being challenged to transform its HIV response for sustainability by 2030 and beyond, as declining funding and competing priorities threaten progress.

[Independent (Kampala)] Kampala, Uganda -- Uganda has made major strides in reducing the number of infants born with HIV, but persistent challenges remain in achieving the goal of zero infections. While the country has implemented effective prevention strategies and expanded access to antiretroviral therapy (ART), the number of new HIV infections among children continues to be higher than expected.

[Unicef] Johannesburg -- Ahead of World Children's Day 2024, data from multiple countries reveal children's awareness of their rights, but significant barriers to education persist

[263Chat] In Zimbabwe, a quiet revolution is taking root as smallholder farmers embrace traditional grains like millet and sorghum to secure their livelihoods and combat the growing threat of climate change.

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When it comes to protecting sensitive information like financial data, personal information, and intellectual property, encryption has become a must. By scrambling data through the use of algorithms, only those with access to decryption keys are able to read what's being secured. Encrypted traffic has fulfilled its intended mission: to lock down data. But, could it simultaneously be helping bad actors slip by undetected? And could encrypted traffic actually make it harder for network defenders to spot threats before it's too late? To find out, we sat down with Phil Owens, VP of customer solutions at Stamus Networks. Phil believes… [Continue Reading]

It feels like just yesterday Google announced its plan to phase out the third-party cookie and sent the entire advertising industry into a tailspin.

So how can we create a culture of generosity and abundance in our lives and parishes? This is the key question Bill Marianes raises on this episode of Stewardship Calling. Stay tuned for a big announcement at the end of the show regarding expanded programming from Bill on AFR.

Bill Marianes talks live with guest Joe Kormos of the Orthodox Church in America. Their topic? Small Parish Challenges.

Fr. Tom interviews the leaders of the Crossroad program at Hellenic College in Brookline, MA. Crossroad is intended to help High School students discern their life callings, matching their personal gifts with the needs of the world. His guests are Ann Bezzerides, Mary Long, and Dan Belonic. He referenced in this interview his very informative eight-part AFR podcast series on the Church and State. In the next program, Fr. Tom will interview some of the participants in Crossroad.

Fr. Tom speaks with two students and a leader in the Crossroad program.

One of the challenges of our present spiritual situation is that our society has settled for something less than truth. This affects the quality of our opinions, policies, and judgments and undermines our ability to live and spread the Gospel. An indicator of the seriousness of this is our growing inability to listen to, learn from, and love people who think differently than we do. In this presentation, I frame the situation as a problem of discernment, compare scientific and Orthodox methods of knowing, and describe how polarization keeps us from using either well. I conclude with a discussion of the critical role diversity plays in discerning truth, and how the Gospel can transform the (Babelic) divisions that deafen us to the truth into a (Pentecostal) harmony that proclaims and celebrates it. Emulating the academic forum the paper was written for (the 2020 Institute for Studies in Eastern Theology), Dn. Timothy Kelleher then offers his thoughts on the presentation and subject. Enjoy the show!

Fr. Anthony talks frankly with Fr. Gregory Jensen, PhD, about the how the selection of priests affects the quality of priestly ministry. From narcissism to the built-in preference for agreeableness - it's all grist for the mill. Enjoy the show!

Our calling this week is to enter into the profound contrast between the ways of the world as we know them and the life of our crucified and risen Lord. Especially today, it is easy to focus on what is going wrong, on what we have lost already or may lose in the future.

This week we read Revelation 19:1-10 in the light of Isaiah 61:10, Genesis 3:21, Matthew 16:27, and 1 Peter 5:5, noting that the praises of God are undergirded by substantial reasons, that we are called to cooperate in our salvation, and that we have been blessed in a way that confers unimaginable dignity upon human beings.

Fr. Ted speaks at an adult lenten retreat at All Saints Greek Orthodox Church in Toronto, Ontario.

Steve and Kevin interview syndicated columnist Rod Dreher about today's Islamic faith. Buckle up!

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Fr. Philip reflects on the Eucharistic context of the pastoral response to contemporary challenges in marriage, family, and sexuality.

In his third lecture, Dr. Demetrios Katos addresses the ways in which theology is scientific, why we should never say “mere symbol” in Orthodox thought, what we mean by essence and energies, what we mean by a personal God, and how the Bible and other sources are used in theology.

Bobby Maddex interviews Andrew Boyd, the Director of Youth, Young Adult, and Campus Ministry with the Orthodox Church in America, about the OCA YouTube Challenge for Orthodox high school and college students.

Bobby Maddex interviews Presvytera Kerry Pappas, the Coordinator for Seminarian and Clergy Couple Care of the Center for Family Care of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, about an upcoming conference on marriage titled "Oneness: Growing and Protecting the Blessed Communion."

What exactly is the Sunday of Orthodoxy? Is it recognition of an achievement, or is it more than that? Fr. Pat explores the meaning of icons and the Triumph of Orthodoxy. This homily was preached in 2008.

Britain's Cameron Norrie is unable to finish a frustrating season on a high as he loses to France's Benjamin Bonzi in the Moselle Open final.