BarCamp everywhere!
As many of you know, my current plans are to move to Portland, OR come August. I figured it would be a good idea to attend the local BarCamp.
There were some travel issues that prevented me from attending more than one day of the three-day get-together. Which was a shame, because the one day was pretty awesome.
Posted on May 7, 2008 by john
Presentation updates
I’ve updated my “Write Your Own Bayesian Classifier!” page with slides from LPW ‘07, and added the slides for a quick lightning talk on Support Vector Machines (presented at the same conference).
Posted on December 21, 2007 by john
BarCamp Milwaukee, day 2
Back home again (bless Amtrak’s “Quiet Cars”—the conductor sternly ordered no fewer than four passengers to shut off their cell phones and put them away).
The day was rainy, and (as expected) the participants were all a bit groggy. Although i had brunch with a friend beforehand, i could have dined on waffles.
The second-day presentations were a little more low-key. There was a popsicle-stick craft session…
Posted on October 14, 2007 by john
Barcamp Milwaukee
This is my second BarCamp, but my first in Milwaukee.
Chicago to Milwaukee isn’t too bad of a trip, especially on Amtrak, which lets me plug my laptop in and get some stuff done. Specifically, it let me work on my presentation (Write your own Bayesian classifier!)....
Posted on October 13, 2007 by john
A certain notoriety
One of my clients has now listed me on their about the team page. That’s right, i’m pretty impressive.
Seethroo is actually a good idea: classifying pages automatically for ad inventory. It’s something that dozens of companies have tried to do, but it looks like they’re going to do it well. So, more power to them, and i’m glad i was able to be involved.
Posted on October 12, 2007 by john
Combining progressive variances
So, i ran across a math problem that i don’t know how to solve.
Recently, i was building a text-based categorizer for a client. During the feature selection phase, i needed to calculate the average and standard deviation for each potential feature. In my early runs, i implemented this straightforwardly by keeping the per-document counts in per-feature sequences. This worked fine for a couple dozen documents, but on the actual training set (which holds a few thousand documents), this expanded predictably rapidly. The sequences were proportionally longer, but the number of features (and thus, the number of sequences) also increased (sublinearly, but enough). Long story short, despite my beefy workstation, the sequences were eating through my 4G of RAM and larger swap and still demanding more….
Posted on October 3, 2007 by john
Rant or die redux
A recent article was a repost. And it was a rant, pure and simple. Still, there was some substance to it, and it’s worth revisiting after four and a half years.
At the time, i was in a full-time position, working exclusively with Perl (and, consequently, with other Perl programmers). I was working with Python on hobby projects. Sometimes, familiarity breeds contempt. I’m a freelancer now, no longer tied to a specific language. I do still work with Perl occasionally, but more of my time is spent with Ruby, Python, Haskell, and occasionally Java. I’ve mellowed quite a bit on the subject, though my opinions are still of the same flavor.
My criticisms centered around two things: the syntax (which is pretty clear from the article) and the community (which might not be obvious). Let’s talk about the syntax first….
Posted on September 20, 2007 by john
The next big open source thing
I was recently asked what my predictions were for trends in open source over the course of the next couple years. I wanted to restate and expand on that answer.
A couple years back, we saw the MVC web frameworks start to appear. We saw dozens of them. Some were full-stack, some patchwork. Some opinionated, some highly configurable. Eventually we saw Rails and Django rise up in popularity over the others1. And along the way we learned some things about web development.
And now we’re evening out. The number of new viable web frameworks will drop in the coming year, because we’ve found and refined the dominant web app paradigm. Innovation will happen, but it will wait a couple years, the same way we waited after apache’s language mods (mod_perl, mod_python, etc) took over….
Posted on September 16, 2007 by john
$self->rant('perl') or die;
This entry was originally posted on February 7th, 2003 (honestly, check the wayback machine). It was the most popular of my articles at the time, but fell off the web when my site went down temporarily. Now it’s back. The formatting has changed, and some links have been updated, but it is otherwise uncut.
Perl. I really dislike Perl. I also get my paycheck by programming in it, so i force myself to deal. But i really dislike it.
The typing system is bad…
Posted on September 12, 2007 by john