A Semi-Coherent Review of PyCon Canada 2012
Two weeks ago I was foolish enough to take a few days to escape from university life long enough to go to PyCon Canada, a nice little conference in Toronto that can only be described with words that end with exclamation marks: fantastic!, awesome!, etc. I’m no veteran of tech conferences — this was, I [...]
Getting the Patriot USB wireless adapter to work with the BeagleBone
(For the benefit of fellow “embedded systems” students…) If you’re having trouble getting the Patriot USB wireless adapter working with the BeagleBone, I found this Raspberry Pi forum post really useful. You have to change the commands slightly for the Beagle. To download the driver and install it, run the following on your Beagle: ubuntu@arm [...]
The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Volume 2
The second volume of The Architecture of Open Source Applications was just released thanks to the hard work of Amy Brown and Greg Wilson. I had the privilege of helping copyedit a few chapters of the book. Here’s the blurb: Architects look at thousands of buildings during their training, and study critiques of those buildings [...]
Diversity in practice: How the Boston Python User Group grew to 1700 people and over 15% women
The sheer humility, honesty, and deliberate action these two people took to fight a problem they saw in the world is inspiring. They listened to people, really listened to people, and didn’t shy away from the faults in their approach. This is the most practical guide for how to get fresh blood into programming that [...]
Winner of the 2012 Spam Comments Award goes to…
Long time fan and reader of the Tavish Armstrong blog, 2012 UEFA Euro Football Cup, had this pithy quote to share: Make no judgments where you have no compassion. — Anne McCaffrey In that vein, Adrian Chen’s profile of Horse_ebooks is worth a read. Spambots are starting to get really weird.
Bret Victor: Inventing on Principle
Before CUSEC 2012 I didn’t know much about Bret Victor, and I wasn’t even all that interested in his talk. I knew he would be talking about user experience, but that’s all. I thought his website was pretty cool, but I didn’t look too closely at it. The night before, I started to suspect his [...]
Thoughts on the Quorum paper
Recently on the “It Will Never Work In Theory” blog Greg Wilson blogged about a paper by Andreas Stefik, Susanna Siebert, Melissa Stefik, and Kim Slattery on “An Empirical Comparison of the Accuracy Rates of Novices using the Quorum, Perl, and Randomo Programming Languages” (pdf). The paper compares Perl, a popular programming language, to two [...]
Sebastian Thrun’s driverless cars
This semester I’ve been taking Stanford’s Introduction to Artificial Intelligence in my spare time. The course is fantastic, and I’m learning a lot. One of the best things about the course is how practical it is. Artificial Intelligence is not science fiction any more. Sebastian Thrun, one of the professors, is a charming guy. Not [...]
Spam Filter in Haskell
Check out this spam filter I wrote in Haskell while watching the Stanford AI lectures! The same technique (Naive Bayes Classification) is used in most effective spam filters, albeit with more parameters. This version simply calculates the probability of a word being either spam or ham (the technical term for non-spam), based on how frequently [...]
pressureNet now has 500 installs
Two weeks ago I posted about my friend Jacob’s project, pressureNet, which lets Xoom users pool together their barometer data. Well, Jacob informs me that they’re past 500 installs now. By the looks of their screenshots, they’ve at least got users in North America, Central America, South America, and Europe. I wonder if this is [...]