NPCT

While I’m complaining about Erlang: why doesn’t Google ever return any hits on the documentation? If I google “perl sprintf” the first hit is the documentation page http://perldoc.perl.org/functions/sprintf.html. The same thing happens if I Google “python array” or “lisp map” or “php echo.” If I type “erlang supervisor” I don’t get anything [...]

Like just about everything to do with Erlang, database driver support appears to be in total disarray. I’d like to be able to store data in a PostgreSQL database and access it reasonably well. Options appear to be

Erlang psql driver that is a fork or something of the code by Erlang Consulting. [...]

In my previous post, I complained a lot about trying to get XML stream parsing working. Ultimately, I just decided to rip the guts out of ejabberd, rather than reinvent the wheel. The relevant files are xml_stream.erl, xml.erl, and expat_erl.c. You can see how to use it in ejabberd_receiver.erl. Frankly, these [...]

There’s a lively debate out there about how one should communicate with clients in a game, in particular UDP vs TCP. I won’t go into details about it, but you can read a lively debate here. The choice for my ridiculous game is TCP+UDP. I want to use TCP for various communications [...]

There’s been some discussion lately on the UAI mailing list about repositories for gene expression data. Here are some of the places people have pointed to:

Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO)
Array Express
Stanford Microarray Database
Tim Hughes’ Lab

If you are writing code that is dominated by evaluation of the exponential function, you cannot do without these two papers:

Nicol N. Schraudolph. A Fast, Compact Approximation of the Exponential Function. Neural Computation, 11(4):853–862, 1999.

G. C. Cawley. On a fast compact approximation of the exponental function. Neural Computation, 12(9):2009-20012, 2000.

The implementations described yield 3x [...]