Notes on codes, projects and everything
In the previous post, I re-implemented Annoy in 2D with some linear algebra maths. Then I spent some time going through some tutorial on vectors, and expanded the script to handle data in 3D and more. So instead of finding gradient, the perpendicular line in the middle of two points, I construct a plane, and find the distance between it and points to construct the tree.
Recently I switched my search code to Annoy because the input dataset is huge (7.5mil records with 20k dictionary count). It wasn’t without issues though, however I would probably talk about it next time. In order to figure out what each parameters meant, I spent some time watching through the talk given by the author @fulhack.
Implementing a Information Retrieval system is a fun thing to do. However, doing it efficiently is not (at least to me). So my first few attempts didn’t really end well (mostly uses just Go/golang with some bash tricks here and there, with or without a database). Then I jumped back to Python, which I am more familiar with and was very surprised with all the options available. So I started with Pandas and Scikit-learn combo.
A friend of mine recently posted a screenshot containing a code snippet for a fairly straight forward problem. So after reading the solution I suddenly had the itch to propose another solution that I initially thought would be better (SPOILER: Turns out it isn’t). Then mysteriously I stuck myself to my seat and started coding an alternative solution to it instead of playing Diablo 3 just now.
Usually I take about a week to learn a new language so I can start doing some real work with it. After all a programming language (at least the high level and dynamic ones) is just assignment, calculation, branching, looping and reuse (and in certain cases, concurrency/parallelism, not gonna dive deep in defining the difference though). Well, that was true until I started learning Rust, partly for my own leisure.
I’m not sure why Windows Media Player 11 doesn’t like mp4/aac format but not being able to transfer my tracks in mp4 through MTP to my N81 really piss me off. At first I installed Songbird 1.0.0 to try synchronizing the tracks through the MTP addon but it doesn’t even play *.mp4 tracks out of the box under Windows XP SP3 (although it claimed otherwise). Weird thing happens when I was trying to synchronize anyway by having the files renamed to *.mp4 extension and it succeeded but without any meta-tag information.
Sometimes, letting a piece of code evolving by itself without much planning does not usually end well. However I was quite pleased with a by-product of it and I am currently formalizing it. So the by-product is some sort of DSL for a rule engine that I implemented to process records. It started as some lambda functions in Python but eventually becomes something else.
In the previous post, I re-implemented Annoy in 2D with some linear algebra maths. Then I spent some time going through some tutorial on vectors, and expanded the script to handle data in 3D and more. So instead of finding gradient, the perpendicular line in the middle of two points, I construct a plane, and find the distance between it and points to construct the tree.