tail-fENETDOWNhttp://enetdown.org//tail-f/ENETDOWNikiwiki2016-06-13T07:22:40Zlinkdump for 2014-02-23http://enetdown.org//tail-f/posts/2014/02/23/linkdump/zaki2014-02-23T08:07:07Z2014-02-23T08:03:46Z
<ul>
<li>Check out the <a href="http://ivmooc.cns.iu.edu/">Information Visualization MOOC</a>
from Indiana University.
[<strong>data_science visualisation mooc</strong>]</li>
<li><a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/06/how_people_read_online_why_you_won_t_finish_this_article.single.html">How people read online: Why you won’t finish this article.</a>
[<strong>reading behavioural_psychology</strong>]</li>
<li>Map of <a href="http://admixturemap.paintmychromosomes.com/">world ancestry</a> derived
from genetic data (companion to the paper <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/343/6172/747">A Genetic Atlas of Human
Admixture History (2014)</a>).
[<strong>genetics map</strong>]</li>
<li><a href="http://www2.imm.dtu.dk/pubdb/p.php?3274">The Matrix Cookbook</a> by Kaare Brandt Petersen, Michael Syskind Pedersen: this is a useful reference for different matrix operations [<strong>mathematics PDF book</strong>]</li>
<li><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Genetically_Engineered_Machine">International Genetically Engineered Machine
(IGEM)</a>
is a worldwide synthetic biology competion for undergrads that has been held
since 2003.</li>
<li>I was reading this post asking about a library for <a href="http://blogs.perl.org/users/ron_savage/2014/02/seeking-3d-graphics-lib-for-js.html">3D stacked charts</a>
so I looked at <a href="http://christopheviau.com/d3list/">The Big List of D3.jsExamples</a> for something appropriate.
I found <a href="http://bl.ocks.org/camio/5087116">d3 with x3dom Demo</a> which uses
<a href="http://www.x3dom.org/">X3DOM - home</a>, a library I had never heard of for a
spec I had also never heard of. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X3D">X3D</a>
is a modern update to the VRML that I remember seeing on the Web a long time ago.
[<strong>web javascript graphics visualisation 3D d3.js</strong>]</li>
<li>My picture is in the <a href="http://news.perlfoundation.org/2014/02/2013-year-end-report.html">2013 Year end report</a>
from The Perl Foundation (TPF) on the very left of page 5 in the PDF. From
what I hear, paper copies of this will be sent out to people that attended
TPF events in the past few years, meaning it'll go all over the world!
[<strong>perl</strong>]</li>
<li><a href="http://dave.whipp.name/tutorial/fourier.html">Visualizing the Discrete Fourier Transform</a>
[<strong>mathematics visualisation javascript animation signal_processing</strong>]</li>
<li><a href="http://www.musanim.com/">Music Animation Machine</a>
[<strong>music animation visualisation</strong>]</li>
</ul>
linkdump for 2014-02-12http://enetdown.org//tail-f/posts/2014/02/12/linkdump/zaki2016-06-13T07:22:40Z2014-02-13T02:56:17Z
<ul>
<li><p>This <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2014/02/07/273174533/lung-in-a-box-keeps-organs-breathing-before-transplants">device</a> (check out the GIFs!),
called the <a href="http://www.transmedics.com/wt/page/organ_care">Organ Care System</a>,
extends the life of organ transplants by providing an environment for the organ by
keeping warm blood flowing while it is in transport. There are other systems that do
the same, but this looks more portable.</p></li>
<li><p>This <a href="http://www.pythonb.org/">Python with Braces</a> project seems cool. Don't
know if it's a joke or not, but they forked the CPython code (via <a href="https://twitter.com/evan_lee">Evan Lee</a>).</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/interactive-map/penn-engineering/">Engineering Map of America</a> from PBS' American Experience</p></li>
<li><p>I saw this <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/02/07/the_u_k_s_year_of_code_director_lottie_dexter_doesn_t_know_how_to_code.html">article</a>
about how one of the people promoting people to learn to code doesn't actually know how to code. This isn't actually that big a problem.
The actual problem is that too many people think that computer science is about
programming computers. Ostensibly, yes, that is what you do when you program,
but really, what you want to do when you program is to learn about
algorithmic thinking. You want to be able to think about logic and control
flow and state. Those skills can be learned without a computer. Many of the
most prolific computer scientists did not need computers to do computer
science. This is why I like the <a href="http://csunplugged.org/">CS Unplugged materials</a>.
You really need to check out their <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/csunplugged">videos on YouTube</a>.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://www.deepfield.com/about-deepfield/">DeepField</a> is a company that does big data analysis on cloud infrastructure
(via this <a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/the-website-where-people-watch-people-play-video-games-gets-more-traffic-than-facebook">article</a> about Twitch.tv may have more traffic than Facebook).</p></li>
<li><p>Some more info on the Marvel Comics API from <a href="http://enetdown.org/tail-f/posts/2014/02/08/linkdump/">last time</a>: apparently they use a graph DB which
makes sense for what they are doing. There is a video from the <a href="http://www.graphconnect.com/new-york/videos/">GraphConnect New York</a> conference
<a href="http://vimeo.com/79399404">here</a>. This other <a href="http://new.livestream.com/hugeinc/events/2474611">video</a> is mainly the same
but there is a QA session at the end (@ 34:40).</p></li>
<li><p>Two links on DIY tooling. <a href="http://makezine.com/magazine/make-37/patdelany/">Pat Delany</a> has been working on making open-source machine tools for cheap. His work on the
<a href="http://opensourcemachinetools.org/multimachine/">MultiMachine</a> is driven by a desire to make toolmaking tools available to anyone around the world:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s strange, but at my advanced age I realize that machine tools are about
all that I believe in. The lathe, shaper, and mill built the foundation of
our current standard of living and there is no reason why a cheap and
easy-to-build multipurpose tool could not help the 500 million people that
need simple water pumps or the billion people who live on a dollar a day or
less. Thanks for getting a crazy old man started.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here's another cheap tool: <a href="http://www.instructables.com/id/mini-circular-bench-saw-from-scrap/">Mini circular bench saw from scrap</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>I got quoted in this <a href="http://thedailycougar.com/2014/02/12/laboratory-helps-ideas-mature-businesses/">newspaper
article</a>
about UH's startup accelerator, <a href="http://redlabs.bauer.uh.edu/">RED Labs</a>.
As I said in the article, I would really like to see more CS, engineering,
and tech-related students join the program and get involved.
The <a href="http://redlabs.bauer.uh.edu/cs/">Computer Science Entrepreneurship Workshop+Startup Lab - RED Labs</a> was a
good start for reaching out to the CS students and there are more initiatives
underway for the next semester, but we need to grow a passion for creating
new things — I know it's there, but we need more expression and drive.</p></li>
<li><p>This article titled <a href="http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software">Girls and Software</a>, while
written about the gender problem faced in the software industry, had a
different effect on me. It reminded me why I love the Internet and online
communities. When you can "hide" your AFK identity behind a pseudonym, people
don't treat you with the same AFK prejudices. I remember that I was able to
converse with people much older than me and they didn't know they were
talking to a 12-year-old. This was quite a freeing feeling as I could push
myself to do things that you wouldn't expect from someone so young.</p></li>
<li><p>Music video: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQXtyYi7soE">Sinine - All The Same (instrumental)</a> (via
<a href="https://www.facebook.com/mindinabox.official/posts/3958246291377">mind.in.a.box</a>).
And it's award-winning. :-)</p></li>
</ul>
<div class="youtube">
<iframe width="445" height="364"
style="border:thick ridge #222222;" allowfullscreen=""
src="http://enetdown.org//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/OQXtyYi7soE?rel=0"></iframe>
</div>
<ul>
<li><p>I read this article by Peter Seibel about <a href="http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/">code reading</a>
a few weeks ago. I love the idea of literate programming, but often you can't code that way because there is too much clutter.
Short pieces of code like <a href="http://backbonejs.org/">Backbone</a> are easier to
read from beginning-to-end. A comment by <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=dmunoz">dmunoz</a>
on a Hacker News post about a <a href="http://www.jeffknupp.com/blog/2014/02/11/a-celerylike-python-task-queue-in-55-lines-of-code/">55-line Python task queue</a>
(<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7218046">thread</a>) really sums up the sentiment nicely:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Absolutely. I'm always pleased when documentation includes some pseudocode
for what the system generally does, without the overhead of configuration,
exceptional control flow, etc. It's not always possible with large systems,
but makes it a lot easier to see the forest, not the trees, in even
mid-sized code bases.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>(via <a href="http://blogs.perl.org/users/grant_mclean/2014/02/which-code-to-read.html">Which code to read?</a>)</p></li>
<li><p>This video of an <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_XpgELNE9k">autonomous boat</a> demonstrates mapping and path planning on water.
Now I'm wondering if the <a href="http://www.osvehicle.com/">open-source vehicle</a> I shared <a href="http://enetdown.org/tail-f/posts/2014/02/08/linkdump/">last time</a>
could be augmented with drive-by-wire to make a cheap driverless car testing platform! (via <a href="https://twitter.com/evan_lee">Evan Lee</a>)</p></li>
</ul>
linkdump for 2014-02-08http://enetdown.org//tail-f/posts/2014/02/08/linkdump/zaki2014-02-11T17:21:26Z2014-02-11T17:18:30Z
<ul>
<li><p>I was looking at parsing of HTML<a href="http://enetdown.org//tail-f/#fn:1" id="fnref:1" class="footnote">1</a> and came across a paper on parsing XML
with regex titled <a href="http://www.cs.sfu.ca/~cameron/REX.html">REX: XML Shallow Parsing with Regular Expressions</a>.
But what's even more interesting is a project by the author called
<a href="http://parabix.costar.sfu.ca/">Parabix</a> which implements parallel text
processing.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://diging.github.io/tethne/">Tethne</a> looks like a neat Python tool for bibliographic network analysis.</p></li>
<li><p>I was reading a blog post about how
<a href="http://blog.dopter.se/post/75494422535/the-marvel-api-a-case-study-in-how-to-not-respect">horribly one-sided</a>
the Terms of Service for the <a href="http://developer.marvel.com/">Marvel API</a>
are and I came across the <a href="http://apilicens.se/en/">Swedish API License</a>
which attempts to create a license that doesn't just force developers to give
up many of their rights to the API providers.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://www.darpa.mil/OpenCatalog/">OpenCatalog</a> is a list of open source projects that are funded in part by DARPA.</p></li>
<li><p>I saw this <a href="http://www.wired.com/autopia/2014/02/open-source-vehicle/">open-source car</a>
and was reminded of how I've wanted to build my own car for quite a while. Imagine the learning possibilities!
There is actually a <a href="http://www.evxteam.org/">high school team</a> in
Philadelphia that works on designing and racing hybrid cars. Here's an
article in <a href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/simon-hauger-revs-up-high-schools-with-car-projects">IEEE Spectrum</a> and
a video from <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/fast-times-at-west-philly-high/">PBS Frontline</a>. That is way cool.</p></li>
<li><p>Bioimaging consortium that connects academic and industrial partners: <a href="http://cyttron.org/research">Cyttron</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>I love backing up design with numbers and this user study on <a href="http://uxmatters.com/mt/archives/2013/02/how-do-users-really-hold-mobile-devices.php">how people hold their mobile devices</a>
makes me happy. </p></li>
<li><p>I came across the book <a href="https://www.areditions.com/cmdas/DAS13/cmdas013.html">CMDAS: Knowledge-Based Programming for Music
Research</a> while in
freenode's ##prolog. Algorithmic composition with Prolog!</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://education.github.com/">GitHub Education</a> is a very good idea. More
students need to learn about version control and testing while in school.</p></li>
</ul>
<div class="footnotes">
<hr />
<ol>
<li id="fn:1"><p><a href="http://programming.oreilly.com/2014/02/parsing-html-with-perl-2.html">without</a> and <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4231382/regular-expression-pattern-not-matching-anywhere-in-string/4234582#answer-4234491">with</a> regex (for certain values of regular :-P)<a href="http://enetdown.org//tail-f/#fnref:1" class="reversefootnote"> ↩</a></p></li>
</ol>
</div>
linkdump for 2014-02-06http://enetdown.org//tail-f/posts/2014/02/06/linkdump/zaki2016-06-13T07:22:40Z2014-02-08T03:45:02Z
<ul>
<li><p>I was looking for a way to perform OCR on nutritional facts and I came across
this <a href="http://www.fastcoexist.com/3024951/we-took-the-laser-scanner-that-tells-you-whats-in-your-food-out-for-a-spin">handheld spectroscopy tool</a>
that gives you the content of food by measuring the chemical composition.
Basically a tricorder?</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox">Moravec's paradox</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>"[I]t is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level
performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or
impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to
perception and mobility."</p>
</blockquote></li>
<li><p>I was thinking about the <a href="http://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/nargout.html">nargout</a>
feature of MATLAB and wondering that was possible to do the same in Perl.
Well, with the <a href="https://p3rl.org/Want">Want</a> module, you can.</p></li>
<li><p>As part of my interest in mathematical expression recoginition from the
previous linkdump, I came across this scan of the <a href="http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~aps/research/projects/as/">Handbook of Mathematical Functions with Formulas, Graphs, and Mathematical Tables</a>
that can be used as data for scientific document analysis.</p>
<p>It's always fun to see names you recognise from elsewhere on the Internet as I did here</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Thanks to Bruce Miller of the National Institute of Standards and
Technology, who sent me a clean new copy of the book for scanning. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>I recognise Bruce Miller from the <a href="http://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/">LaTeXML</a>
project.</p></li>
<li><p>This is a neat book about <a href="http://openglinsights.com/">OpenGL</a> that spans
many different techniques for visualisation with OpenGL. Code from the book
is available <a href="https://github.com/OpenGLInsights/OpenGLInsightsCode">here</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>Using a Möbius strip as a track for a superconductor is brilliant idea:</p></li>
</ul>
<div class="youtube">
<iframe width="445" height="364"
style="border:thick ridge #222222;" allowfullscreen=""
src="http://enetdown.org//www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/zPqEEZa2Gis?rel=0"></iframe>
</div>
<ul>
<li><p>GitHub released a view for looking at GeoJSON sometime last year, but now you
can look at the history of a map: <a href="https://github.com/blog/1772-diffable-more-customizable-maps">Diffable, more customizable maps</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>The retinal implants used to address <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retinitis_pigmentosa">retinitis pigmentosa</a>
have passed FDA approval and now <a href="http://www.uofmhealth.org/news/archive/201401/u-m-kellogg-eye-center-performs-first-two-retinal-prosthesis">two surgeries</a>
have been performed on patients. I first heard about these when I was
starting my biomedical engineering degree and I've found these kinds of
prostheses really inspiring.</p></li>
<li><p>On a related note, I read this
<a href="http://www.infoworld.com/d/consumerization-of-it/interview-woz-innovate-get-personal-235555">interview</a>
with Woz about innovation and here gives the example of about wearable computing:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There are about 30 companies that seem to be doing the same thing. But
nothing seems to be pointing to the right way," Woznak says. One reason is
simple: "You tend to deal with the past," replicating what you know in a new
form. Consider the notion of computing eyeware like Google Glass: "People
have been marrying eyewear with TV inputs for 20 years."</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I later came across this
<a href="http://www.historytoday.com/nicholas-hiley/candid-camera-edwardian-tabloids">article</a>
about how early developments in camera technology created new kinds of uses
for the camera in society. Apparently Google Glass' photography is not that
new. Instead of saying "OK, Glass", you would activate the camera with a cough :-P</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As Jarche recalled, bowlers and ‘Blocknotes' were indeed so common on the
press benches that 'those of us in the know used to watch the hats rise
slightly when anything happened'. 'At the same minute, there was certain to
be a cough. Then we knew that some one had shot'. Yet this strategy could
bring its own problems, for at one point during the Crippen trial in 1910
there was so much coughing from the press benches that the judge threatened
to have them cleared.</p>
</blockquote></li>
</ul>
linkdump for 2014-02-05http://enetdown.org//tail-f/posts/2014/02/05/linkdump/zaki2014-02-05T06:53:54Z2014-02-05T05:58:05Z
<ul>
<li><p><a href="http://www.vlfeat.org/">VLFeat</a></p>
<p>This computer vision library has a couple nice, readable implementations of
features. It seems to have a C library component and a MATLAB component, but a
number of the useful functions are only available from MATLAB. This would be
useful to test out a MATLAB source-to-source compiler.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://www.ionroad.com/">iOnRoad</a> is a phone application that watches the
road ahead of a driver and gives warnings. In the future, this is the sort of
stuff that should probably be integrated into the cars themselves.</p>
<p>Interesting use of computer vision. However, having it running for long periods of
time might cause the phone to overheat and quickly drain the battery. Some
sort of embedded FGPA coprocessor would be wonderful for dashcams.</p></li>
<li><p>I've been listening some more to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Get_'Em_Out_by_Friday">Get 'Em Out by
Friday</a> by Genesis.
Interesting comment in the Wikipedia article:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The song uses elements of reality and science fiction as a means of social
criticism on the corporate greed and oppression of the UK's private landlords
in the 1960s and 1970s,</p>
</blockquote></li>
<li><p>The recent GoldieBlox ad in the SuperBowl led me to thinking about other STEM
toys and I was reminded of the build-it-yourself kits from companies like
Heathkit. Apparently Heathkit is returning to making kits and ran this IAmA on reddit in December:
<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1td554/iama_member_of_the_heath_company_heathkit_board/">IamA member of the Heath Company ("Heathkit") Board of Directors. AMA! : IAmA</a>.</p></li>
<li><p>Fun <a href="http://skvoe.tumblr.com/post/73084589806">set of images</a> imagining a Bruce Lee action figure making breakfast.</p></li>
<li><p>Neat podcast about d3.js: <a href="http://datastori.es/data-stories-22-nyt-graphics-and-d3-with-mike-bostock-and-shan-carter/">Data Stories #22: NYT Graphics and D3 with Mike Bostock and Shan Carter - Data Stories</a></p></li>
<li><p>This morning I woke up to a <a href="https://rt.cpan.org/Public/Bug/Display.html?id=92091">resolved bug report</a> that I filed not
too long ago. Apparently the <a href="https://p3rl.org/URI::Title">URI::Title</a> package has a <a href="http://blogs.perl.org/users/book/2014/02/adopting-urititle.html">new maintainer</a>. Awesome!</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://cat.iti.es/mer/">Mathematical Expression Recognition</a> is a
demonstration of a tool for recognising handwritten mathematical formulae
online. Even though I'm using a mouse to draw things out, it's really good at
picking up things such as fractions, summations, and integrals, but it can't
do partial derivatives and matrices yet.</p></li>
<li><p>My friend <a href="https://twitter.com/michaeljslater">Michael</a> pointed me to a cool
online game called <a href="http://www.roblox.com/Landing/Animated">ROBLOX</a> that
uses Lua to program an open-world. This reminds me of Second Life (which uses
its own scripting language) which is interesting because
<a href="http://corp.roblox.com/leadership">one of the people</a> at ROBLOX, Dylan Bromley, used to
work at Linden Lab.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="http://shakers.pixel-shaker.fr/">Pixel Shakers</a> is an aggregator of several blogs on computer vision.</p></li>
</ul>