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.
The making of this plugin was completely a random act of hand-itchiness. A friend of mine (@cornguo) published a fun app online. There is a name for this kind of app, but I can’t recall at the moment. It typically displays some buttons (usually in a grid), and clicking them causes some sound to be played. The interesting part in cornguo’s app is that there’s a text-input field where the name of the buttons can be typed-in for replaying.
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.
This update took me quite a bit more time than I initially expected. Anyway, I have done some refactoring work to the original code, and thought it would be nice to document the changes. Overall, most of the changes involved the refactoring of function names. I am not sure if this would stick, but I am quite satisfied for now.
Just a quick update to the previous post, the virtuoso storage engine works with redland provided the required packages are properly installed (yes, yes, yes, I know I haven’t release my PHP OO wrapper for Redland). Now that the package is installed, we need to do some configuration so that Redland can use it.
As the name implies, Resource Definition Framework, or RDF in short, is a language to represent information about resources in world wide web. Information that can be represented is mostly metadata like title (assuming the resource is a web-page), author, last modified date etc. Besides representing resource that is network-accessible, it can be used to represent things that cannot be accessed through the network, as long as it can be identified using a URI.