Nam H. Pham

Sometimes I get confused how to choose wash cycle and dry cycle ? how to separate clothes correctly ? when to wash in cold/warm/hot water ? what is normal/delicate/permanent press ? etc

It’s not a rocket science but very easy to forget and wrongly choose. Here is some experiences I collected from some websites and my own experience:

First, here is the basic setting for almost all laundry stuffs you might have:

As far as I understand, permanent press clothes are stuffs that contains chemically treated fabric that makes your clothes less wrinkles. Clothes with permanent press features I can think of is like office uniforms, pants, t-shirts, skirts and 100% cottons. Delicates include polyesters, sweater, wool.

The harshness degree of each wash cycle and wash dryer is reduced gradually from regular > Perm. Press > Delicates.

As you see in the table, white/light color should be washed in hot water and can be used with bleach. Color one and heavy-duty clothes like jeans should be washed in cold water and taken inside-out to preserve color.

One more thing is that towels should washed separately from other stuffs. It can make other clothes marked with a lot of lints. I am having a bad experience with it right now

Also, don’t overload the machine. The height of cloth pile should not be over the height of the agitator (the center column in the machine).

Last but not least, I found some interesting guidelines in this following website. Check it out:

http://www.automaticlaundry.com/laundry1.htm

I will upload some firework pictures I took in the fourth of July in the next post

This is a very interesting question I found in CareerCup.com (link):

Given an unsorted array of n numbers, find the number that appears more than n/2 times. Do it in O(n) time and O(1) space.

First, I did not come up with the solution. The solution is described here.

Second, the idea is as follow: If there exists a major element M which appears more than n/2 times, all of the other elements can be paired with this element M. It means that if we crossed out each instance of element M with another element different from M, only instances of M are left.

In short, we need to maintain a counting variable count and a current candidate of major element M:

+ if count == 0 -> assign M to current element

+ else if M == current element -> count++

- else if M != current element -> count –;

After this loop, the candidate of major element is stored in M and it appears at least count time. Please note that M is only the element that seems to appear more than other elements. It does not mean it’s a major element. For example: given 1 2 3 -> M will be 3 which is not a major element.

Therefore, we need to count again all instances of element M to verify the number of occurrence is larger than n/2.

Here is the pseudo code for this algorithm:

FindMajorElement A[1..n]
//init
count = 1
M = A[1];

//find the candidate
for (int i = 2;i <= n;i++)
     if (count == 0) M = A[i];
     else if (A[i] == M) count++;
     else if count--;

count = 0; //reset the variable to number of instance M

//verify
for (int i = 1;i <= n;i++)      if (M == A[i]) count++; //return if (count >= n/2) return M
else return null;

That’s it

Hi,

I just had a wonderful 6000-mile-road trip with my friends to west coast. We had a lot of fun there. I tried to capture all moments we had during the road trip. Please visit here for more pictures of our wonderful time.

Happy Memorial Day !!!