• 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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• Generating grids in javascript

  Recently I find some of my pet projects share a common pattern, they all are based on some kind of grids. So I find myself writing similar piece of code over and over again. While re-inventing wheels is quite fun, especially when you learn new way of getting things done with every iteration, it is actually quite tedious after a while.

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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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• Re-implementing a rule engine in Javascript (Introducing Ruler)

  Sometimes, letting a piece of code evolving by itself without much planning does not usually end well. However I was quite pleased with a by-product of it and I am currently formalizing it. So the by-product is some sort of DSL for a rule engine that I implemented to process records. It started as some lambda functions in Python but eventually becomes something else.

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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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• Further Hack on the Multi-Dimensional Approximate Neighbour Search

  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.

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Random Posts

• Hello World from Zend MVC

  This post continued from this post. Finally I have found some time to start developing my pet project using Zend Framework. After getting the controller to work the way I am more familiar (comparing to Kohana which I used at work) with, the next step is to get it to output some data.

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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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• 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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• Implementing Fuzzy c-means in Clojure

  I was asked to evaluate fuzzy c-means to find out whether it is a good clustering algorithm for my MPhil project. So I spent the whole afternoon reading through some tutorial to get some basic understanding. Then I thought why not implement it in Clojure because it doesn’t look too complicated (I was so wrong…).

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• 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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