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A major snowstorm hit New York City last night and today. Started snowing heavily around 10 pm, and it's still snowing now. The New York City Department of Sanitation deployed 2,000 pieces of heavy equipment, including 350 salt spreaders and 20 snow-melters. The news said 2,500 workers at a time were deployed on 12 hour shifts salting, plowing and digging out the roads.
About 200,000 tons of rock salt had been stockpiled.

The National Weather Service described the weather conditions "a major snowstorm" with winds of up to 50 miles per hour. By about 8:00 a.m., more than a foot (30.48 centimeters) of snow had accumulated in Central Park.

BTW, I've been meaning to make a comment about this for a while, but I always forget. It's about the acclaimed iPod wheel-based interface. Sure, it's nice, everybody loves it, etc. However, personally, I think it has one major flaw that I will try to explain.

Once I am playing a song, I have a tendency to want to browse the other songs I have loaded and see what I'd like to hear next. When you do that, and you have thousands of songs in the device, it becomes a pain to go back to what you were listening to, which I want to do to see how much I have left, or skip ahead, etc. The easier way to do is to go back to Now Playing, which takes quite a few wheel clicks. Not really friendly. Another way is to scroll back and find your song again, but this is not practical when you have many thousands.

The interface feels limited in the sense that it lacks shortcuts to jump around the library in an easier manner.

I thought so from the very first time I tried a 2nd generation iPod, couldn't believe there wasn't an easy way to get back to the song currently playing in 1 or 2 clicks. And I like them, they are neat little devices. I have owned a 3rd generation, a 4th generation, a Nano, a Shuffle, and a Mini, and I've always found the interface a bit lacking. So much so, that ultimately they end collecting dust by my desk at home in a few days after the novelty wears off.

Lee's homework is due again today. This week it contained one interesting little exercise:



Do you think you are good? Can you come up with a clever solution? Let's see it

Be sure to test various inputs to make sure your algorithm outputs proper results. Sample test inputs are:

[-1,3,-2.5,-4,-10] => output is [-1,-2.5,-4,-10,3]
[0,1,2,3,4,5] => output is [0,1,2,3,4,5]
[5,4,3,2,1,0] => output is [0,5,4,3,2,1]
[5,4,3,2,1,-1] => output is [-1,5,4,3,2,1]
[-1,0,1,-3,4,-4,-7] => output is [-1,-3,-4,-7,0,1,4]
etc

Here is a quick rudimentary solution I came up with. Not particularly elegant, but it gets the job done. You may want to work on yours first, so you aren't influenced by mine.