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So I’ve been exercising lately. The last visit to the Dr. was a wake up call. 300 lb .. WHAT?! So, taking an iterative approach to exercise, I’ve manged to work up to 6-day a week cardio routine and a 3-day a week strength training routine and have gone from just over 300 lb. to 270 lb. in a couple months. Couple friends asked how I started and what I do, so I figure I’d break it down here.

I started by walking. 3 times a week for a couple weeks. Then after reading a Lifehacker post about a morning routine and matabolism, I added my very fast morning routine and actually eating breakfast to my day. Made it a whole week Monday-Friday. Then I bumped up the walking to Monday through Saturday. Did the morning routine and the walking for another week, then I bumped up the walking to targeted cardio 3 out of the 6 days and did that for another week. Added strength training 1 out of the 6 days and did that for another week. Switched from walking to cardio on all 6 days and + 1 more week. Then strength training 3 days out of the week. And slowly over about 3 months, I built up to this routine.

Every morning
I do this right after eating breakfast
2 sets, push-ups, 30 sec OR failure
2 sets, scissor kicks, 1 minute OR failure

Monday through Saturday
2 minute warm up
20 minutes of cardio (140-160 heart rate, check with your Dr.)
2 minute cool down

Strength training
This adds another 20 minutes to my workout, so schedule for that
Monday – Push (chest, triceps)
Wednesday – Pull (bicep, shoulders)
Friday – Legs (legs and stomach)

Now, it is just habit. Also, I am sure there is some study somewhere to prove or disprove this, but I find it makes my mind much sharper. I am more alert through out the day and I sleep much better at night. Not to mention clothes fitting better and just feeling better. My personal goal is 250.

Python tip
Prefer xrange to range when you need an arbitrary number of iterations as range actually generates a list for you, this will consume memory and be more costly than xrange.

Today is election day in the states. Lots of free coffee and donut offers floating around for those few people wearing their I voted sticker.

Tomorrow I head out for my trip to Iceland. From Florida to Iceland in the Fall, makes perfect sense right? It was an excuse for me to purchase some new warm wear and jogging shoes, have to keep up with the exercise routine even on vacation. I should be able to maintain the blog from there keeping the spirit of blog every day in November.

Snippet of Python
In an effort to always have something a little Python related in all my posts, here is how to use list comprehension to filter out no value items from a list.

foo = ["A", "", "C", None, "E"]
bar = [i for i in foo if i]
print bar
['A', 'C', 'E']

Been reading around and I guess November is the official blog entry a day writers month or something. I’ll make a go again. In October, I tried the one post a day run for my blog. I did well, but fell short in the end. Though I’ve already missed the first two days in November, I’ll call that the margin of error.

Oh and I believe the posts should have some meat to them. Not just another “Hey look, a post, I win November.” Though as a last resort, I am not above that.

So for lack of anything better to write about, here is an oldie but goodie. A Python implementation of the proxy pattern (virtual proxy) with a real worldish feel to it.

First we define our ABC and subclass it for our needs.

class File(object):
    def load(self):
        pass

class RealFile(File):
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name
        self.load()

    def load(self):
        print "Loading %s..." % (self.name)
    def process1(self):
        print "[phase1] Processing %s..." % (self.name)
    def process2(self):
        print "[phase2] Processing %s..." % (self.name)

Now, we can subclass File for our proxy. Now I know what you are saying. You don’t need the extra levels of abstraction because Python doesn’t have the levels of type sensitivity of other languages. Could you just implement this in the first RealFile subclass? Yes, but that isn’t the point of this. The verbosity helps define the example and keeps this implementation language independent (mostly).

class ProxyFile(File):
    def __init__(self, name):
        self.name = name
        self.file = None

    def process1(self):
        if not self.file:
            self.file = RealFile(self.name)
        self.file.process1()

    def process2(self):
        if not self.file:
            self.file = RealFile(self.name)
        self.file.process2()

So you can see, this hides away the details of loading the file. Allows the user to call process1 / process2 as the business logic determines and preforms lazy loading. The Proxy pattern is very powerful when combined with other patterns. Like Null Object and Lazy loading.

def main():
    f1 = ProxyFile("bigdb01.csv")
    f2 = ProxyFile("bigdb02.csv")
    f3 = ProxyFile("bigdb03.csv")

    f1.process1()
    # some busines logic
    f1.process2()
    # more BL
    f2.process2()
    # more BL
    f2.process1()
    # Hey, we found what we needed, skipped f3
    #f3.process()

if __name__ == '__main__':
    main()

You can view full source at: http://trac.pieceofpy.com/pieceofpy/browser/patterns/proxy.py