Posts in April 2010
Tagging Files
I have many many projects and each of them resides in a different folder in my home directory. This makes finding anything a challenge if I haven't modified it in a while. I decided this morning that what I needed was a tag based file-system. Tags are used all over the internet. In technical terms , they allow bottom-up classification rather than the traditional top-down type system. This is more in tune with the way the human mind works and so it's more natural to use.
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posted April 1, 2010. It has four comment(s).
tagged with: AND-based filesystem lookup project python snippet sqlite3 tagging
Pygame Greyscale
For varies reasons I wanted to convert a pygame surface to greyscale this morning, but I couldn't find a decent solution on the internet. Converting to an 8bit surface then changing to a greyscale palette doesn't work as you may hope. The solution I eventually came up with is :
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posted April 3, 2010. It has 342 comment(s).
tagged with: convert format grayscale greyscale pygame python snippet surface
Artificial Intelligence - Part One Of A Billion - Textons
On of my main computer-related interests is Artificial Intelligence (AI from here on in). It interests me because in order to program a computer to act with intelligence, you have to be able to explain exactly how we think. This is fiendishly difficult. Although we may be able to rationalise our conscience thoughts, this is no help unless we can uncover the intricacies that happen beyond our reach.
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posted April 5, 2010. It has four comment(s).
tagged with: AI ai-series graphs images links project textons vision
Artificial Intelligence - Part Two Of A Billion - Learning Manifolds
Last night, during the course of researching, I came this Wikipedia page. It talks mainly about reducing dimensionality of data by learning a manifold that describes it .
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posted April 9, 2010. It has four comment(s).
tagged with: AI ai-series dimensionality images mainfolds vision
Manifold Learning - Some Results
I've been researching manifold learning recently, see here, and to this end, I'm designing a generative algorithm to learn manifolds based on topological methods. It's not done yet, but I have some initial results, based on computing geodesics, that are quite interesting. I have a fairly large dataset of hand-written twos which I've fed into my program. Each line in the image below represents a geodesic.
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posted April 12, 2010. It has five comment(s).
tagged with: AI geodesic images learning manifold results vision
A Watchdog Timer In Python
I have lots of snippets of code that are extremely useful to me in a great deal of projects and I'm going to put as many of them as I can on this website in the future. The first one I'm going to share with you is a watchdog timer. Basically what it does is raises an exception on portions of code that take too long to complete. As ever, there's not warrenty of any kind and it's being put into the public domain. I'm not sure it'll work on windows.
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posted April 21, 2010. It has five comment(s).
tagged with: python snippet timer watchdog
Rss
This is just a quick post to say that I've added RSS syndication to my website. It's extremely easy to do in Django, see here to documents.
posted April 24, 2010. It has four comment(s).
tagged with: django rss website
The Social Web. Where Is It?
The internet is huge. I don't know if you've ever noticed how mind bogglingly huge it really is .
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posted April 24, 2010. It has five comment(s).
tagged with: google information internet knowledge library social social bookmarking thought web
Date And Time
Another quick post, my blog now stores the creation date as a date and time rather than just a date. You should be able to see this in the rss feed. It involved migrating database schema in Django. I might blog about this another time. It's important to remember to migrate the id when you migrate , because otherwise you'll confuse the foreign keys....
posted April 24, 2010. It has four comment(s).
tagged with: datetime django migration rss website
What's Actually Wrong With Windows?
Whenever I write software that does any kind of non-trivial networking I run into the same problem. It would be great if I could write a program that would take care of the underlying details. It would provide a point of contact to the outside world and to processes that would like to take part in the protocol. The problem with this approach is that it will work wonderfully on any unix related operating system, but on windows this is impossible to do efficiently. The reason for this is that windows is a single user operating that is designed to work under the assumption that only one process is working at a time. This means that processes can't work in the background easily. It means that processes can't communicate easily, why would they need to when there's only one? It means that everything that is great about the unix design is missing in windows.
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posted April 30, 2010. It has eight comment(s).
tagged with: communication design IPC networking OS process thought unix windows
