Apache Cloudstack

Apache Cloudstack is a OSCC (open source cloud computing).

Here is a great tutorial walking you through some of the basic features of Cloudstack by visiting the frontend management console.

VISA – Permanent Labor Certification Detail

In the big data world, qualified data scientists are really rare and within the qualified ones, most of them are well educated, highly skilled foreign labors, like people from China, India etc.

For the alien employees to legally work in the U.S., they have to hold certain type of VISA (H1B temporary working VISA). To make sure they will keep contributing to the employer, one must understand the PERM process and help the employee to get GC (green card) so the employee can work permanently in the U.S.

Here is a page from United States DOL (Department of Labor) that briefly describes the 9 steps to get the PERM application approved.

http://www.foreignlaborcert.doleta.gov/perm_detail.cfm

Ruby – What I have learned in the first 60 minutes

I came across the Ruby tutorial from code academy and realized that it is really light weight, easy to program since it is a high level interpreting language.

To help you get started, make sure you know where the documentation is first.

also, here is a few commands that I ran through the ruby shell and a file.

Codeacademy – Online Coding Class

If you are interested in learning how to code, here is a website which integrates online code editor that you and learn and hone your skill there. GO codeacademy!

SCRUM – Free Online Strum Training Series

Here is a list of free online scrum training videos. They include a brief introduction to the idea of SCRUM as a whole, and then dive into each component of a scrum process. They have some interesting animations and real life case which makes the training very logical and vivid. I personally think this is the most amazing and well-made online scrum training. Definitely check it out if you think your team is not well organized.

Python – Flask Render Template

Python – something about function arguments

We have talked about briefly how to read in arguments from the command line using argparse from this post, however, do you know there is really a lot that you might not know about defining a function in Python. How to read optional argument, how to read in positional argument and also how the scope/namespace works. Those are all really interesting questions and you can check out this python documentation – Controlflow.

The example above show that an argument start with one start will read in the arguments sequentially and it doesn’t have to use the keyword args even if most people use *args all the time.

Second, **kwargs is short keyword arguments. As you can see, it will parse the function input as a dictionary and store the keyword along with its corresponding values in a dictionary.

Python – py2app turn python application into mac app

Python – ConfigureParser

When you application is getting more and more sophisticated, you might need to have some configuration file which contains some arguments the user might want to customize later. If it is only about one or two arguments, users might be fine passing them to the command line arguments directly. However, if you have tens of arguments and you happen to be a python programmer. Definitely check out the built-in ConfigParser library.

Here is how the exported config file looks like: