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

• Database transactions involving prepared statements

  I was thinking whether it is possible to avoid exposing PDO and PDOStatement objects to the users of my database library (mainly just me). While I was working on my project I sort of notice that there is a almost fixed pattern whenever I work with the database. With this in mind, I added in some new functions to the library, and decided to make a quick release for this.

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• Processing JSON with dask.bag

  Often times, I am dealing with JSONL files, though panda’s DataFrame is great (and blaze to certain extend), however it is offering too much for the job. Most of the received data is in the form of structured text and I do all sorts of work with them. For example checking for consistency, doing replace based on values of other columns, stripping whitespace etc.

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• Yet another Instant Messaging service

  I have recently made my Adium useless by moving all my IM accounts to my beloved Nokia N9. While moving my buddy lists of all major instant messaging services, I did a quick check on each of the contact to see past interaction. It is sort of surprising to see I don’t actually chat with them as frequent as I thought, so why do I “need” my Adium opened all the time?

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• Mixing Non-array and Array in array_map()

  array_map function is a function that I use the most in my php scripts recently. However, there are times where I want to pass some non-array into it, therefore often times I have code like the snippet shown below:

  $result = array_map(
'some_callback',
array_fill(0, count($some_array), 'some_string'),
array_fill(0, count($some_array), 'some_other_string'),
$some_array
)

  It doesn’t look good IMO, as it makes the code looks complicated. Hence, after seeing how the code may vary in all different scenarios, I created some functions to clean up the array_map call as seen above. Code snippet after the jump

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• Building librdf-storage-virtuoso Package

  I wanted to try using virtuoso as the storage engine for Redland but unfortunately there is no librdf-storage-virtuoso package for Ubuntu. After getting some help from @dajobe, I attempted to build the packages myself. Although it takes quite some time to build packages, but not too difficult it seems.

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