Monthly Archives: December 2009

The Tweeting Narcissist

I’ve been playing a bit with the Sinatra web framework, and after some intermittent coding, I ended up with a toy project I’m calling the Narcissist Quotient. It may seem that I’m poking fun at of Twitter’s ego-centric bent, and perhaps this is true. It is equally possible, however, that my design is to satirize [...]
Posted in Computer Science, Ruby | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Clojure :pre and :post

Courtesy of Hacker News, this morning I stumbled upon a blog post mentioning :pre and :post assertions, a new feature in version 1.1 of Clojure. Given the rather messy nature of several functions in Gajure (my toy genetic algorithm framework), it seemed to me that I had an ideal opportunity to make use of this [...]
Posted in Clojure | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Slowly Programming in R

Recently, I coded up a cross validation function in R, and things were moving rather less quickly than I would have liked. (The purpose of c.v. is to assess how well one’s statistical analysis will generalize to an independent data set.)  Anyhow, I was implementing 10-fold cross validation, and with a dataset containing around 100,000 observations, my [...]
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National Novel Writing Month

In circumstances rather less than coincidental, a conspicuous absence of November posts coincided with my participation in NaNoWriMo (national novel writing month). Thus, throughout last month, I had a great — if difficult — time writing what might be described as a shallow antithesis to the next Great American Novel. Ever so sadly, fifty thousand words was not enough to contain the [...]
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