Since I posted a postmortem of my entry to Kaggle's See Click Fix competition, I've meant to keep sharing things that I learn as I improve my machine learning skills. One that I've been meaning to share is scikit-learn's pipeline module. The following is a moderately detailed explanation and a few examples of how I use pipelining when I work on competitions.
The purpose of this post isn't to bemoan the expanding surveillance state, warn of impending civil liberty revocation, or even to make you feel paranoid. I only want to talk sensibly about a few tools that we should all be comfortable using and know when we should use them.
I read a total of 14 books last year. I had set my goal for 15, but finished the year two-thirds of the way into three different books. I tend to read plurally.
When I need to give my brain a rest, I like to play Minecraft on an interesting server known as Civcraft. The unique thing about this server is that it is an experiment in anarchy of sorts. There are no rules except not to exploit software glitches that could give you an unfair advantage. Robbery, murder, griefing and trolling of all sorts are completely legal within the rules of the server. As a result, there have evolved complex and organic societies complete with competing cities, marketplaces and even ad hoc police forces and bounty hunters.
I gave a talk to the Atlanta Ruby Users Group on using the HTTP OPTIONS method as outlined in my previous post. The slides aren't super great without me talking to explain them, but they may be of some use.
The OPTIONS method is a somewhat obscure part of the HTTP standard that could be used today with a strong impact on the interconnectedness of the interwebs while requiring minimal effort. It's role is well defined in RFC2616, yet no web services that I can find are taking advantage of it.
I've been using CanCan for managing role-based authorization in Rstrnt, my restaurant management solution. CanCan is a very simple and easy-to-use authorization library that works out-of-the-box with Devise (and any other authentication system that provides a current_user method). However I had a use case that doesn't seem to be documented on the project's wiki.
jQuery Meow mimics Growl notications. It supports all jQuery events and you can bind it to various sources for message input making it ideal for form validation, Rails flash notices, or a replacement for the alert() box.
Enjoy this Fibonacci function until I get my site finished
