NPCT

I am writing a paper on nonparametric Bayesian density modeling and I would like to compare my technique to the standard approach of the infinite mixture of Gaussians (iMoG). You can read Carl Rasmussen’s paper to get a feel for what it’s all about. My plan is to look at hold-out log probabilities [...]

Our downstairs neighbors, who are our very very good friends are moving away. They’re huge karaoke addicts and so we got them a fun parting gift: Rock Band for the PS2. This game is so much fun, it’s painful. Obviously, I know people have liked it, and Guitar Hero has been a [...]

I have this fairly nice setup for my home office, since I work from home more or less exclusively. I like to play the occasional PC game, so I have a reasonable video card setup. I had two eVGA 7600GT video cards in an SLI configuration. Well, this all turned sour last [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I use Latex Beamer to do all my talk slides. Problematically, however, it can be tempting to pack the slides full of equations. Obviously if you’re presenting mathematical results this is unavoidable. This page on using arrows in equations with Beamer is fantastic. I’m definitely using them in my next presentation.

I’ve posted twice now about starting an Erlang project (one and two). I now have a directory structure and a Makefile that I’m happy with, plus some odds-and-ends from my first attempt at stubbing out an OTP application. I’m now going to begin again, with a healthy dose of Chapter 18 from Joe [...]

Continuing on with the previous Erlang post, there have been a couple of developments: 1) Programming Erlang arrived from Amazon, 2) trapexit.org came back online, and 3) I found this awesome blog.
To remind you of my immediate goal: I want to figure out how to organize a large-scale Erlang project. I want to learn [...]

Per my previous post, I’m going to start a little Erlang project. I’ll call it “North Zulch,” or “NZ” in reference to the tiny little place where the family ranch is located.
There are three things that I’ve had to solve over and over (or at least cut and paste over and over), in [...]

I have decided for some reason that it would be fun to play with massively scalable systems. In particular, I thought it would be a hilarious waste of time to work on an MMO engine. I’m not sure why this seems like a good idea, given that I have more than enough on [...]

We got our Wii primarily as a party-game machine. I certainly enjoy my games, but tend to prefer the PC. We figured the Wii would be fun for when we’re hanging out with friends and family. This has certainly been the case, and we’ve enjoyed hours of Wii Sports at Thanksgiving and [...]

It’s stuff like this that makes computer science research fun.

Over the past several months, I’ve found myself enjoying a good bit of Half Life 2 Deathmatch. It’s nothing complicated, just good fun running around getting as many frags as you can. Most maps give you access to the majority of the HL2 weapons, including the gravity gun. It’s quite fun to [...]

I recently picked up a Netgear PS101 Mini Print Server. The reason was that I work from home most of the time now, and needed to be able to print papers. However, the only “real” printer we have is an older HP LaserJet 4L. It works fine, but it only has a [...]

I upgraded my desktop last night from Ubuntu Feisty Fawn to Gutsy Gibbon. I must say that it was a pretty disappointing upgrade. The things that broke are:

My mouse behaviour inexplicably changed to “focus on click” from “focus on mouse over” - and the settings to change it back are not under the [...]

When I bought our Wii a couple of weeks ago, I immediately bought Wii Play, because friends had told me that while the game is not worth $50, you effectively get the game for $10 if you were going to buy another remote anyway. This pretty much sums things up. The games are [...]

I just got a Wii for my birthday! It was a little early, but I convinced Brenda that if we didn’t get one now, it would be impossible to get one closer to the holidays. In fact, WiiTracker almost never reports any in stock. The local Target, Wal-Mart, Circuit City and Best [...]