2020 December

• Refreshing the ReactJS Internet Censorship Dashboard (and Dockerizing Poetry Projects)

  The Internet Censorship Dashboard is a project that aggregates data fetched from the OONI API, to provide an overview of the current state of Internet Censorship experienced by users mainly in Southeast Asia. The current form was built a couple of years ago, and recently got funded to get it updated to work better with new APIs.

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• Revisiting semantic web (plus wheel building with Poetry)

  Back then, when I was still working on my postgraduate degree research, I used RDF, which was the preferred format in the world of Semantic Web to represent data. I eventually dropped the degree, and stopped following the development of the related technology and standards. Until I volunteered to update the import script for popit when I was looking for the next job/project.

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• Working Environment Setup, for 2020

  In recent years, I start to make my development environment decouple from the tools delivered by the package manager used by the operating system. The tools (compiler, interpreters, libraries etc) are usually best left unmodified so other system packages that rely on them keeps working as intended. Also another reason for the setup is I wanted to follow the latest release as much as possible, which cannot be done unless I enroll myself to a rolling release distro.

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• 4 Fundamental Things in Programming (pre-101)

  Just recently I volunteered to do a pre-101 kinda workshop for people wanting to learn programming. I had done this a few times in the past, but in different settings and goals in mind. The whole structure predates the sessions but I can’t remember when I first created them.

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• Picking Up Category Theory (and eventually Haskell)

  I don’t quite remember when did I first heard about Category Theory, but the term stuck in my head for quite a while. Eventually I attempted to start looking for tutorials on the topic, but it is hard to find one that I actually understand. Most of them are either leaning too much to the Mathematics side, or too much to the Programming side.

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• Performing Statistical Analysis with Python

  This is the year I kept digging my old undergraduate notes on Statistics for work. First was my brief attempt wearing the Data Scientist performing ANOVA test to see if there’s correlation between pairs of variables. Then just recently I was tasked to analyze a survey result for a social audit project.

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Random Posts

• Working Environment Setup, for 2020

  In recent years, I start to make my development environment decouple from the tools delivered by the package manager used by the operating system. The tools (compiler, interpreters, libraries etc) are usually best left unmodified so other system packages that rely on them keeps working as intended. Also another reason for the setup is I wanted to follow the latest release as much as possible, which cannot be done unless I enroll myself to a rolling release distro.

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• Learning asyncio by redoing my messaging bot

  I used to develop a bot, partly for work, that fetches current latest petrol retail price in Malaysia. The bot was really an experiment, but at the time it worked well. Then a few years later, out of boredom, I revisited the project after finding the telegram bot library is moving towards asyncio. It was great (at least a lot of people rave about it), but also at the same time intimidating, I learned about coroutines and used gevent in the past, but not asyncio itself.

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• The Little Pythoner, Part I

  I saw this article from alistapart, which is about Javascript’s prototypal object orientation. So the article mentioned Douglas Crawford, and I was immediately reminded about my struggle in understanding the language itself. Back then I used to also refer to his site for a lot of notes in Javascript. So I went back to have a quick read, and found this article that discusses the similarity between Javascript and Lisp.

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• Quick and Dirty way to manage my VIM config

  Not sure about the others, but the obsession to my coding tools is probably more than I would admit. I have just managed to do a dirty quick hack to manage my VIM configuration settings. While I am sure there are other people doing this, I would like to show my reinvented wheels.

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• Regression with 2-means clustering Annoy (non-scientific)

  So apparently Annoy is now splitting points by using the centroids of 2 means clustering. It is claimed that it provides better results for ANN search, however, how does this impact regression? Purely out of curiosity, I plugged a new point splitting function and generated a new set of points.

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