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Setting the To value: cell in Excel’s Goal Seek to a Cell Reference
Sadly, it took awhile to “figure” this out. I was trying to solve a set of equations in Excel. I had one equation in one cell, say B1, that had a dependency on the value in A1. I had the second equation in cell C1 that also has a dependency on A1. I wanted to set cell B1 equal to CELL C1 by changing cell A1. You can’t do this with Excel’s Goal Seek feature, the To value: has to be a number.
The solution of course, was to create a third cell, D1, with the formula “= B1 – C1”. When those two cells are equal, as I wanted, D1 = 0. So now you can ask Goal Seek to solve the set of equations by setting cell D1 to value 0 by changing cell A1.
Yay!
pydotplus on macOS
I’ve been playing around with SciKit-Learn’s decision tree regression function. In one of the examples I was working on, they provided a demo script to print out a jpg of the decision tree. Cool! Unfortunately, my system didn’t have pydotplus installed. I’m using Anaconda, so issuing the following command took care of that issue:
conda install -c conda-forge pydotplus
However, when attempting to run again, this produced and error stating that the GraphViz executable could not be found. Ugh. Luckily, a quick trip to Homebrew took care of that issue:
brew install graphviz
Voila!
Move to Trash Deletes Immediately
I had this issue when I first updated to macOS Mojave. To solve it, I performed the following command in Terminal:
sudo rm -Ri ~/.Trash
[enter your password]
Then, Log out. Log back in. Move to Trash now works as expected.
Note: You can implement Delete Immediately… by holding down Option-Command-Delete.
NBA 2018 Bracket
Okay, the NBA bracket challenge has a horrible interface! As a reminder for future years, don’t use this! Go with ESPN or someone else. Having said that, here’s my NBA bracket. I think it shows my picks except for the Blazers, who got their asses swept by the Pelicans, so zero points there! Amazing that was the series with a sweep.
Go Warriors!
NHL 2018 Playoff Bracket
Here it is. Haven’t followed much hockey this year but going with the heart!
P.S. I do have a second bracket with Tampa Bay taking the east and the Preds winning it all but I’m not posting that one 🙂
NCAA March Madness 2018 Bracket
University of Virginia to win it all 🙂
Sending email with PHPMailer
It appears most of the examples out there relate to version 5.2. The current version is 6 and I had to make the following change in order to get it to work. Everything else from the examples worked.
Change: $mail = new PHPMailer(); To: $mail = new PHPMailer\PHPMailer\PHPMailer();
I’ll post (or edit this post) a full example shortly.
FTP on macOS High Sierra
As you may have noticed, FTP is no longer a part of macOS High Sierra. If you are in the Terminal, you’ll get something like this:
Norms-iMac-Pro:~ norm$ ftp
-bash: ftp: command not found
An Apple Forum’s post has this reasoning.
Fortunately, there is Homebrew to the rescue. As pointed out in that post, you can install the `inetutils`, which includes FTP. All you need to do is:
brew install inetutils
Unfortunately, for me, this resulted in a linking error, as the directory `/usr/local/share/man/man8` is not writeable. You can solve this by by issuing the following command:
sudo chown -R $(whoami) /usr/local/share/man/man8
Then run the link command again:
brew link inetutils
I hope this is helpful and happy FTPing!
Installing GCC-7.3.0 on macOS High Sierra
I talked about getting GCC-5.3.0 running in a previous post. As part of some benchmark testing I’m doing for a new computer build, which I hope to write about in a future post, I ventured back into the world of parallel programming. I used the excellent instructions from Solarian Programmer found here to get GCC-7.3.0 running on macOS High Sierra 10.13.3.
Strictly speaking, the link above points to instructions for compiling GCC-7.1.0. While it’s not a big deal to modify these instructions for 7.3.0, here’s a text document with just the command line instructions to get 7.3.0 up.
Note: I did have to make one small deviation from the instructions provided in the link (as noted in the text document attached). I tried to “make” GCC7.3.0 with “make -j 4” but it failed, stating it couldn’t fine “<ctime>”. I retried the make using “make -j 1”, which took a LONG time but worked. I would try 4 first and only if it doesn’t work, try 1.
My previous post also talked about getting OpenMP/Clang running in Xcode and the link provided there works. I did try the steps but couldn’t get it to work. Maybe I’ll try again later but for now, I’m using the command line to compile the OpenMP code.