Early Go problems

Was getting an error in VS code…The name org.freedesktop.secrets was not provided by any .service files. Solution was sudo pacman -S gnome-keyring libsecret.

Also getting strange problem where the editor was deleting my import “fmt”, but a similar program wasn’t having that problem. And googling did not help. Solution was my source wasn’t in a proper subfolder! It took me a minute to figure that one out. It goes to show how important the go directory structure is.

Manjaro…backup or primary distro?

Linux Mint has been my primary distro for many years now, and admit I still like it. I find it amusing being called a noob, usually by some Arch user, while using linux for over 25 years. Yes I realize that Arch with 5000 YouTube tutorial videos, Stack Overflow and countless written tutorials that can easily be found on the Internet, using Google is almost impossible to install. Much harder the the mid 90s distros with buggy software and dependency hell and no google or YouTube. So call me a noob if it makes you feel better. Anyhoo…I’ve always wanted a fallback distro that is fundamentally different from my primary distro. And my search has led me to try a few. Manjaro was one I always wanted to like, but I always had some issue, usually updates, that stopped me from committing to it. Well a while back, I tried it again and have been using it more than Mint for a while now. I think the issues I had with it before are probably still there, but the big change is how I update it. Big changes…pacman command line…small individual program changes are fine using pamac GUI. Notice how similar the names are.

So am I ready to officially commit/switch to Manjaro, primary and Mint, backup?

Off the top of my head the only issue I have with Manjaro is Thunderbird Daily. Every time I start it a page is displayed saying The Daily release of Thunderbird can be unstable. My emails are important to me. So I’d rather them use the latest stable version.

Go!

Created simple “Hello World” program in go…golang. Normally this is the most boring thing you can start with, but something simple was good to just make sure your go directory structure (workspace) is working.

KDE Bookmarks & Places

This is starting to sound like pick on KDE day. Trying to figure out how to add quick and easy access to a directory I access often. I already had one on Dolphins side panel, so I’ve done it before. Anywho I didn’t remember how I put it there. Must be a bookmark. But where is it? So I google and it says I can press CTRL-b to bookmark, so I do, but where is it? It’s not on that side panel. So I stare at the screen and press ctrl-b a few more times to see if I notice anything changing…nope! I guess the default Dolphin setup is to have the Show Menu hamburger style button on the upper right of the screen. I click on it but no mention of bookmarks. More googling with no luck. Finally I click on Show Menubar option on the Show Menu button, After poking around the Menubar selections I find bookmarks under the main Go option. And there they are, my bookmarks duplicated for each time I previously pressed CTRL-b. Well that will work but not quite what I was looking for. Finally I find Add to Places under the File menu selection. Success!

KDE network icon gripe

Apparently the KDE network icon is white when connected and has a splash of green on it when disconnected. Green? I’m not quite sure because I think I’ve seen a splash of red on it sometimes. I know…just google it. But why can’t it just be obvious? I usually have to waste time by hovering my mouse over it to find out. How about green for connected and red for disconnected? You know…like traffic lights. The gnome network icon shows a connected line when…you guessed it…connected. And broke line when…disconnected. I’ve never had to google the gnome network icon to understand what it means…Obvious!

Juypter Notebooks in VS Code

Accidently opened a Juypter Notebook file with VS Code and it worked! I can run individual code cells just like in the browser!

Similarly I opened a Python file that needs the Anaconda environment because that’s currently the only place I have pandas installed, and as long as the interpreter is correct…it works also!

Pandas loc and trying what you learned

Watched YouTube video that showed the loc method to locate a value in your data.
df.loc[df[“column”]==”string”])

However when I tried it on a first name field that I knew was there…it didn’t find any. My data had trailing spaces and I found that if I added trailing spaces to the string (“string “) it found the name.

But that’s not a good way to handle the problem. I knew I had to get rid of the trailing spaces. Solution…use the strip() function. I could have used rstrip, for trailing spaces but strip removes leading and trailing spaces. Perhaps rstrip would be slightly faster?
df.loc[df[“First”].str.strip()==”string”]

This is because I originally formatted the data fixed length with no delimiter to be copied to a mainframe. Which also takes up a lot more space. I really need to reformat it delimited only with no padding!

This is how you learn. By trying what you learned. And when it doesn’t work…you’ll learn even more figuring out why!

Bye Bye Pycharm

It’s back to VS Code. Somehow a Python program I was working on with PyCharm in one of my Python subdirectory got saved to my home directory. That’s strange. That never happened in all the time I used VS Code. Oh well I’ll just move it back to where I keep almost all…if not all my Python programs. However now, after opening it in Pycharm and attempting to run it, it basically it tells me it can’t find it in my home directory. Well there’s a good reason for that. It’s not in my home directory! It’s in the Python subdirectory I opened it with PyCharm from. I don’t know what dumb ass explanation, that probably makes sense if you graduated from PyCharm U, as to why that happened, and quite frankly…I don’t care. Evidently all the basic file handling rules I’ve learned through the years, go out the window if you use the super advanced Pycharm. That’s insane. I want to spend my time right now concentrating on learning pandas not PyCharm. I’m certainly not Charmed!