Development

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 6

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 6 - Lantern Fish. Problem 1 Puzzles for Day 6 focuses on fish population growth. In this case, fish are on a 7 day cycle. After that cycle, a fish produces a new fish and restarts its own cycle. The new fish has two additional days for its first cycle. So, given this, each fish is represented by a counter: 6 or 8 counting down to 0 each day. After 0, existing fish create a new fish (starting at 8), and reset their own counter to 6. Also, the fish start with a certain number of fish at various points in their own cycles as dictated by the input file.

Monday, December 6, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 5

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solutions for Day 5 - Hydrothermal Vents. Going forward I’m combining the posts into a single post per day. Problem 1 Puzzles for Day 5 is about finding the intersections of lines plotted on a grid. In this case, we have a set of lines defined by the endpoints across a 1000 x 1000 grid. For puzzle 1, we will only look at horizontal and vertical lines and count the points where at least two lines intersect.

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Sunday, December 5, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 3

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solution for Day 3, Puzzle 1 - Binary Diagnostic Problem Puzzle 1 for Day 3 involves analyzing some binary numbers that are output and using the frequency that a particular bit is 1 vs 0. For each bit position, we get the frequency across all the input data, then use that total to build two final binary numbers.

Saturday, December 4, 2021 | 8 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 4

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solution for Day 4, Puzzle 1 - Giant Squid Bingo Problem Puzzle 1 for Day 4 is all about bingo. A giant squid has attached to the sub… for a game of bingo. In this case, we’ll process a set of 100 bingo cards and then “call” numbers one at a time until we get a bingo on one of the cards.

Saturday, December 4, 2021 | 6 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 2

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021. Here’s my solution for Day 2, Puzzle 1 - Dive! Problem Puzzle 1 today involves following a series of commands that will take you forward, up or down. Each line of input is a command, followed by a number in the form of : forward 10 Solution All my solutions are written in C#. You can find all my solutions in my Git repo.

Thursday, December 2, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 1, Puzzle 1

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021 (@adventofcode). Here’s my solution for Day 1, Puzzle 1 - Measuring depth increases Problem The elves have lost the keys to the sleigh into the ocean. Puzzle 1 involves reading depth measurements of the ocean floor to determine how quickly the depth increases. We need to determine from a list of measurements, how many of them are an increase over the previous measurement. We’re given an input list of 2000 measurements to be processed in order.

Wednesday, December 1, 2021 | 1 minute Read

Advent of Code 2021 - Day 1, Puzzle 2

Photo by Any Lane from Pexels I’m participating in the Advent of Code 2021 (@adventofcode). Here’s my solution for Day 1, Puzzle 2 - Three Measurement Sliding Window Problem Puzzle 2 involves a more refined measurement of the depth readings by comparing measurements of 3 consecutive readings to the next 3. By that we mean, taking the sum of measurements 1, 2 & 3, and then comparing that to the sum of 2, 3 & 4. If thats an increase, then we count it. We’ll use the same input list of 2000 measurements we used for Puzzle 1.

Wednesday, December 1, 2021 | 2 minutes Read

From the Archives - Re-posting Old Blog Posts

Photo by Lara Jameson from Pexels Once you’ve built up some content, one of the ways to keep your social media presence more active is to re-share your older blog posts. For long time followers, it can remind them of previous content. And it can help bring in new followers who didn’t see that content previously. If you’ve got a blog with an RSS feed that includes all of your content, then picking one at random to re-share is easy to accomplish with Power Automate.

Wednesday, November 24, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

Creating a Custom Connector - Part II

Photo by Daria Shevtsova from Pexels In part I of this post, I demonstrated how to create a custom connector. Now, we’ll follow up with a short post on how to use that custom connector in a flow. Creating Our Flow We’ll start by creating a scheduled flow. We’ll run our flow at 9AM Eastern every day. custom-connector-ii-recurrence

Sunday, November 21, 2021 | 2 minutes Read

Creating a Custom Connector - Part I

Photo by Daria Shevtsova from Pexels (NOTE: Posting to Twitter no longer works. Check my YouTube channel for videos on posting to Bluesky and Mastadon) For those with the higher tier licenses, along with being able to use the premium connectors, you also have the ability to create your own custom connectors that you can use to connect to just about any API on the web. For our fun project this time, we’re going to take the next two blog posts to create a custom connector that makes use of the NASA public APIs in order to grab the Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) and then we will create a flow that runs daily to post that day’s picture in a tweet to our Twitter feed.

Thursday, November 18, 2021 | 7 minutes Read

AI Builder: Training an Object Recognition Model

Last time we looked at identifying information on an invoice. Another feature AI Builder in Power Automate offers is the ability to recognize objects in an image. This time we’re going to look at how to set up AI Builder to identify dice. It should be noted that AI Builder is a paid add-on to Power Automate and does incur an extra cost to use. However, a free trial is available. See the Microsoft Power Automate site for more info. Getting Started Invoice processing required that you gather at least 6 samples of each invoice that you wanted to train the model for. Object identification requires quite a bit more. For training, you will need a minimum of 15 images for each object that you want to identify, plus additional images for testing. Ideally, however you will want at least 50 images of each object.

Monday, November 15, 2021 | 7 minutes Read

AI Builder: Training a Invoice Processing Model

One of the more complex features of Power Automate is the ability to train it to pull data out of scanned images of invoices and automatically import the information. I included a walkthrough of how to get started with this feature in my recent conference talk at Summit NA 2021, but I felt it would be beneficial to provide it in blog form as well. It should be noted that AI Builder is a paid add-on to Power Automate and does incur an extra cost to use. However, a free trial is available. See the Microsoft Power Automate site for more info. Getting Started The first thing you are going to need to get started is to gather at least 6 images of each format of invoice you intend to automate. You will need at least 5 images of each type to use to train the AI model to recognize where to find the data being sought from the invoice. The rest of the sample images will be used to test the model once it’s trained. If you’re looking for example invoices to use for learning purposes, the Microsoft AI Builder documentation includes 2 versions of invoices you can use for this purpose. Or you can use real invoices that you have around.

Sunday, November 7, 2021 | 9 minutes Read