Author Archives: Ethan

How I develop on OSX

It recently occurred to me that I’m dumb. I certainly don’t mean this in any pejorative sense (after all, that would be abrasive to the ego), but rather I would suggest it as regards a behavioral pattern that I tend to follow. Roughly, said pattern goes like this: Identify problem On the grounds of theoretical purity, construct needlessly complicated solution. Implement solution. For [...]
Posted in Apple, Rails, Ruby | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

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 [...]
Posted in Computer Science, R Programming Language | Leave a comment

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 [...]
Posted in Blogging, Writing | Leave a comment

OSX Package Management

A few days ago, I was discussing Snow Leopard with a recent OSX convert. For the record, this person remains primarily a linux user — a stalwart patron of Fedora — but he had very recently acquired a unibody Macbook. As I am similarly a user of both linux and OSX, this came as music [...]
Posted in Apple | Tagged , , , , | 10 Comments

For the Autodidact

I recently stumbled upon several good (and free) books. All in pdf format: Linear Algebra (Jim Heffron) Statistics (Michael Lavine) A Field Guide to Genetic Programming (Riccardo Poli, William B Langdon, Nicholas Freitag McPhee) Neural Networks (Raul Rojas) Introduction to Computing (David Evans)
Posted in Computer Science | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

On Parallelism

Recently, I read an article describing someone’s experiments in parallel genetic programming, and so I decided to run my own. As has been mentioned, I am quite fond of functional languages; for me, easy parallelism is simply a pleasant bonus. I do think its worth noting, however, that while functional programming may be generally awesome, throwing [...]
Posted in Clojure | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Switching to Wordpress

After the comment system on my former blog was decimated last week, I decided to switch over to Wordpress. Despite recent security issues, this platform is far more reliable than a blogging framework that I wrote over a few weekends in Clojure. That’s not to say I’m abandoning the project, but its commenting system needs [...]
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A Genetic Algorithm Framework in Clojure

functional languages. They are wonderfully powerful, and can easily abstract away a basic algorithm that one might apply to many kinds of problems. With this in mind, I decided to build a framework for constructing genetic algorithms in Clojure.
Posted in Clojure | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments