2018

• Learning a new language for more than 2 months (feat. Exercism)

  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.

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• Quick experiment, boosting vs annoy

  While following through the Statistical Learning course, I came across this part on doing regression with boosting. Then reading through the material, and going through it makes me wonder, the same method may be adapted to Erik Bernhardsson‘s annoy algorithm.

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• Reinventing wheels with cheats using Rustlang

  I finally put in some time and effort learning myself a bit of Rust. Though I am still struggling with ownership and lifetimes (which is essentially everything about the language, to be honest), I find it more interesting compared to Golang, which is relatively boring, though being functional (no pun intended). While learning the language, the one thing I came across often is the Option enum, then I remembered that I read something about Monad.

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• Shoehorning redux into jQuery web app

  Recently I volunteered in building a site that reports whether certain websites are blocked locally (please don’t ask why that is happening). As it is a very simple app reporting status I wanted it to be easily scrape-able. One of the decision made was I want it to have things to see on first load, this practically removes the possibility of using react, which is my current favorite.

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• Building Dynamic Form the hard way with React-Redux

  Javascript is getting so foreign to me these days, but mostly towards a better direction. So I recently got myself to learn react through work and the JSX extension makes web development bearable again. On the other hand, I picked up a little bit on Vue.js but really hated all the magic involved (No I don’t enjoy putting in code into quotes).

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Random Posts

• Quick experiment, boosting vs annoy

  While following through the Statistical Learning course, I came across this part on doing regression with boosting. Then reading through the material, and going through it makes me wonder, the same method may be adapted to Erik Bernhardsson‘s annoy algorithm.

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• jQuery holdEvent

  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.

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• Further Hack on the Multi-Dimensional Approximate Neighbour Search

  Traversing a tree structure often involves writing a recursive function. However, Python isn’t the best language for this purpose. Therefore I started flattening the tree into a key-value dictonary structure. Logically it is still a tree, but it is physically stored as a dictionary. Therefore it is now easier to write a simple loop to traverse it.

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• Some status updates

  There are a lot of things I want to post to both here and my personal blogs. However I was sucked into sanctuary for the most of last month. I guess after a month of playing, it is probably time to slowly resume my personal projects.

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• Selecting Node with XPath

  To do node selection for DOM operations, one typically uses CSS selectors as (probably) popularized by jQuery. However, there is another alternative that is as powerful if not better known as XPath. XPath may be able to do a lot more than just selecting node (which I have no time to find out for now) but I will just focus on how to do node selection in this blog post.

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