The Weekly Challenge

HEADLINES

Recently we celebrated the 100th week of The Weekly Challenge and now we are moving to another celebration i.e. 2nd Anniversary. Honestly speaking I never dreamt of coming this far. Thanks to the support and encouragement of 200+ strong members of Team PWC.

I have couple of plans to make the event memorable. Please let me know your thoughts and your preferred choice.

Hold some kind video conference to let all team members interact with each other. We would give each member, say 5 minutes, to share their experiences. I have zero experience holding such event, I must confess. If we agree going this route then I would definitely need helping hands. Please come forward if you could help us organise.

Request each and every Team PWC members to create a short 5 minutes video sharing their experiences. I would then compile all video contributions and make it one fun video for everyone to enjoy.

Also as promised earlier, we would be declaring winners in the following categories for year 2020-21.

1. PWC Prolific Contributor Award (Perl)

2. PWC Prolific Contributor Award (Raku)

3. PWC Outstanding Blogger Award (Perl)

4. PWC Outstanding Blogger Award (Raku)

5. PWC Prolific Guest Award

Like last time, we would declare 3 winners in each category.

While we are talking about contributions, let’s share some interesting stats from the GitHub repository.

1. Commits: 14,996 (+226)

2. Pull Requests: 3683 (+50)

3. Contributors: 160

4. Fork: 201

5. Stars: 90

Last but not least, I would like to thank each and every member for their support and encouragement.

Our solo sponsor Pete Sergeant has been a great support to keep us motivated. We are lucky that he agreed to continue the journey with us in the year 2021. I would like to personally thank Pete and his entire team for their generosity. It would be great if we could add few more to sponsor the prize money so that we could go back and declare weekly champions as we have done in the past. I hope and wish this will become possible in 2021. The amount doesn’t have to be huge. However, it would be nice to show off bunch of supporters. If an organisation comes forward and supports us then that would be the ultimate achievement.

RECAP

Quick recap of the “The Weekly Challenge - 102” by Mohammad S Anwar.

PERL REVIEW

Please check out Perl solutions review of the “Perl Weekly Challenge - 100” by Colin Crain.

If you missed any past reviews then please check out the collection.

RAKU REVIEW

If you missed any past reviews then please check out the collection.

CHART

Please take a look at the charts showing interesting data.

I would like to THANK every member of the team for their valuable suggestions. Please do share your experience with us.

NEW MEMBERS

Please find out How to contribute?, if you have any doubts.

Please try the excellent tool EZPWC created by respected member Saif Ahmed of Team PWC.

GUESTS

Please checkout the guest contributions for the Week #102.

Please find past solutions by respected guests. Please share your creative solutions in other languages.

TASK #1 › Chinese Zodiac

Submitted by: Mohammad S Anwar

You are given a year $year.

Write a script to determine the Chinese Zodiac for the given year $year. Please check out wikipage for more information about it.

The animal cycle: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Goat, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, Pig.

The element cycle: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water.

Example 1:

    Input: 2017
    Output: Fire Rooster

Example 2:

    Input: 1938
    Output: Earth Tiger

TASK #2 › What’s playing?

Submitted by: Albert Croft

Working from home, you decided that on occasion you wanted some background noise while working. You threw together a network streamer to continuously loop through the files and launched it in a tmux (or screen) session, giving it a directory tree of files to play. During the day, you connected an audio player to the stream, listening through the workday, closing it when done.

For weeks you connect to the stream daily, slowly noticing a gradual drift of the media. After several weeks, you take vacation. When you return, you are pleasantly surprised to find the streamer still running. Before connecting, however, if you consider the puzzle of determining which track is playing.

After looking at a few modules to read info regarding the media, a quick bit of coding gave you a file list. The file list is in a simple CSV format, each line containing two fields: the first the number of milliseconds in length, the latter the media’s title (this example is of several episodes available from the MercuryTheatre.info):

    1709363,"Les Miserables Episode 1: The Bishop (broadcast date: 1937-07-23)"
    1723781,"Les Miserables Episode 2: Javert (broadcast date: 1937-07-30)"
    1723781,"Les Miserables Episode 3: The Trial (broadcast date: 1937-08-06)"
    1678356,"Les Miserables Episode 4: Cosette (broadcast date: 1937-08-13)"
    1646043,"Les Miserables Episode 5: The Grave (broadcast date: 1937-08-20)"
    1714640,"Les Miserables Episode 6: The Barricade (broadcast date: 1937-08-27)"
    1714640,"Les Miserables Episode 7: Conclusion (broadcast date: 1937-09-03)"

For this script, you can assume to be provided the following information:

    * the value of $^T ($BASETIME) of the streamer script,
    * the value of time(), and
    * a CSV file containing the media to play consisting of the length in milliseconds and an identifier for the media (title, filename, or other).

Write a program to output which file is currently playing. For purposes of this script, you may assume gapless playback, and format the output as you see fit.

Optional: Also display the current position in the media as a time-like value.

Example:

UPDATED: Input parameters as reported by many members [2021-03-08 16:20 UK TIME].

Input: 3 command line parameters: start time, current time, file name

    # starttime
    1606134123

    # currenttime
    1614591276

    # filelist.csv

Output:

    "Les Miserables Episode 1: The Bishop (broadcast date: 1937-07-23)"
    00:10:24

Last date to submit the solution 23:59 (UK Time) Sunday 14th March 2021.