Code Pornography
The one-liner you see below is the Haskell erotica for the month: twoK=1:(map (2*) twoK) That line will generate an infinite list containing even numbers. I can look @ that line all day and wonder at the beauty of this language. Haskell is God’s language.
Predicting Which Hiragana Character You’re Drawing
I tried to take a shot @ the problem shown above. Turns out just high-school level math is sufficient to make a decent classifier for this. In the Japanese alphabet(s), a character is composed of strokes. These strokes have a fixed order. This restriction is pretty much all you need. I grab the stroke’s end [...]
Communicating Through Fingertips – Finger Gesture Recognition Using Depth Data
In Prof. Vishy’s ML class (cs 590 – top notch course, top notch professor), we don’t have a final and instead we are supposed to apply ML to a problem we find interesting. Microsoft gave all of us interns a Kinect this summer so I decided to put it to some use (I don’t have [...]
When things break
Recently I had to undergo the unfortunate experience of using scipy’s optimizers in the scipy.optimize module. And I had this issue where the algorithm wouldn’t even start iterating. Essentially hitting Ctrl-C would bring up some useless info about a few dll files and “Error”. No stack track nothing. Needless to say, my assignment took 3 [...]
Problem Reductions
Prof. GNF @ Purdue provided one of the best learning opportunities I ever had in CS 381 – Algorithms. A particular section that I was particularly attracted to was problem reductions. Basically, you want to reduce 1 problem to another so you can use a previous solution to solve it. Reductions were (I am using [...]
Fixing my incompetence
Every once in a while when I am about to take off, I promptly have my wings cut – these moments have helped shape a rather interesting college life IMO. So, this semester I happened to fall in Jeff Mark Siskind’s class EE473 where we studied classical AI (stuff that was outdated by the 80s [...]
Fill In The Blank Coders
I had the pleasure of watching the fill-in-the-blank coders the department produces. In a relational database, we delegate I/O to the disk-manager layer, run our own page management in the buffer manager (1 layer above the disk manager) and then when we are supposed to perform operations like adding and deleting tuples, we make calls [...]
A SelfControl Workaround
UPDATE: I now use K9 on windows (a parental controls app that does the job for me : http://www1.k9webprotection.com/ ) (Posted since I saw some traffic to this page recently). I recently made the switch from Mac OS X to Windows (I now own a 17” XPS which is an absolute beast of a machine). I have [...]
More Updates to Listener
One of the rather irritating problems I was facing with Listener was that I had to set the intensity threshold for an alert manually (which is rather stupid). So I added a couple of lines that set the intensity threshold to what the average intensity of the surroundings currently is. So I no longer have [...]