Python

• Protobuf and dask

  While JSON is a fine data-interchange format, however it does have some limitations. It is well-known for its simplicity, that even a non-programmer can easily compose a JSON file (but humanity will surprise you IRL). Therefore, it is found almost everywhere, from numerous web APIs, to geospatial data (GeoJSON), and even semantic web (RDF/JSON).

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• The Little Pythoner, Part 3

  Previously, I started practising recursions by implementing a type check on lat (list of atoms), and ismember (whether an atom is a member of a given lat). Then in the third chapter, named “Cons the Magnificent”, more list manipulation methods are being introduced.

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• The Little Pythoner, Part 2

  In the last part, I implemented a couple of primitive functions so that they can be applied in the following chapters. The second chapter of the book, is titled “Do it again, and again, and again…”. The title already hints that readers will deal with repetitions throughout the chapter.

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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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• Oh NO! My print output is chopped!

  So my cheat with dask worked fine and dandy, until I started inspecting the output (which was to be used as an input for another script). While the script seemed to work fine, however when I started to parse each line I was hit with some funny syntax errors. After some quick inspection I found some of the lines was not printed completely.

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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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• Estimating the value of pi with a line of Python

  I came across a video on Youtube on Pi day. Coincidently it was about estimating the value of Pi produced by Matt Parker aka standupmaths. While I am not quite interested in knowing the best way to estimate Pi, I am quite interested in the algorithm he showed in the video however. Specifically, I am interested to find out how easy it is to implement in Python.

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• Drink All You Can

  Sometimes I really doubt about the advantage of recycling old stuff to fund for new units beyond goodwill. Sure you get to convince yourself that you are saving the environment by doing so, and it also saves money in the long run. However, I didn’t realize how much it generates it may be after trying to work out an answer for a fictional IQ question.

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• Linting a libsvm-formatted data

  While working on a text classification task, I spent quite some time preparing the training set for a given document collection. The project is supposed to be a pure golang implementation, so after some quick searching I found some libraries that are either a wrapper to libsvm, or a re-implementation. So I happily started to prepare my training set in the libsvm format.

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Random Posts

• 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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• Update in tools

  It is very much expected that there will be endless stream of new (and often times better) tools introduced to solve the same set of problems. While I am slowly resuming my programming work, and in the process of reviving my very much dead postgrad project, I found some alternative to the tools I had used in the past. I suppose I shall just jot them down here so that there’s a reference for later use.

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• Sync’ MP4 Tracks through MTP

  I’m not sure why Windows Media Player 11 doesn’t like mp4/aac format but not being able to transfer my tracks in mp4 through MTP to my N81 really piss me off. At first I installed Songbird 1.0.0 to try synchronizing the tracks through the MTP addon but it doesn’t even play *.mp4 tracks out of the box under Windows XP SP3 (although it claimed otherwise). Weird thing happens when I was trying to synchronize anyway by having the files renamed to *.mp4 extension and it succeeded but without any meta-tag information.

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• Linting a libsvm-formatted data

  While working on a text classification task, I spent quite some time preparing the training set for a given document collection. The project is supposed to be a pure golang implementation, so after some quick searching I found some libraries that are either a wrapper to libsvm, or a re-implementation. So I happily started to prepare my training set in the libsvm format.

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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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