2020

• 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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• 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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• Regression with Annoy (cont’d)

  After a year and half, a lot of things changed, and annoy also changed the splitting strategy too. However, I always wanted to do a proper follow up to the original post, where I compared boosting to Annoy. I still remember the reason I started that (flawed) experiment was because I found boosting easy.

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• Building problock – my personal experience

  A few years ago, I was asked to build a game or simulation (alongside 2048) as a part of a job application. Being very impressed with Explorable Explanations, I implemented Conway’s Game of life with Javascript and jQuery (that was before ES6 became popular). Then I made a very simple grid maker jQuery plugin to dynamically generate a grid of divs. If you check the source code, you may realize I rely on Underscore.js a lot back then.

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Random Posts

• 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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• Weekend Code Quiz – Easy Template Parser

  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.

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• Redland for RDF Work

  Although my supervisor strongly recommend using JENA for RDF related work, but as I really don’t like Java (just personal preference), and wouldn’t want to install JRE/JVM (whatever it is called) at my shared server account, so I went to look for an alternative. After spending some time searching, I found this library called Redland and it provides binding for my current favorite language — PHP, so I decided to use this for my RDF work.

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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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• #nand2tetris is fun

  The Nand2Tetris part I at coursera is very much my first completed course. It was so fun to actually work through the material and it feels amazing to know how simple it is to actually build a computer from scratch. While it is simple, it doesn’t mean the course itself is easy though. I was struggling to get the CPU wired up properly that I spent two to three days just to get it working.

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