Notes on codes, projects and everything
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.
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.
Everyone knows folksonomy is (or was) cool and useful, however, when it is applied in real life, then problem arises. The idea of blogging this came while I am struggling to get my literature review report done (been doing it for months, I am being so ridiculous, I know). As a matter of fact, as I am dying to get it done, there are a couple of things that I found to be blog-worthy. So, I will be publishing a couple of brief overview to some of the topics involved in the coming days in a really casual (read: lazy, and full of personal speculations) way to this very humble little blog of mine.
I am currently doing some organization to my blogs. Few weeks ago, after spending months struggling to work in Ubuntu 7.10, I learned about symbolic links. Then I thought this would be good for my project file management. Therefore I started to re-organize my project file structure to utilize symbolic links. One of the projects that uses symbolic link is the current wordpress theme.
After coded enough Javascript few months back, I found that there are a couple of functions that I kept re-using in different projects. Therefore I took some time to refactor them and re-arrange them into a single file. The common code that I keep reusing even today consists of functions that does prototypical inheritance, scope maintenance, some jquery stuff, google maps api stuff and some general ajax application related code.
I haven’t got much time lately, so didn’t write about this new phone that I recently imported. For some reason, this new phone of mine do not act as mass storage device like its predecessors (to certain extend). Thankfully I can still ssh in the phone and this makes it possible to mount it as a sshfs volume.
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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