Fun in Space posts are being migrated here as first-class content, not buried in some sad export folder.
I’m working on a new startup as I mentioned in my previous post, and as the technical co-founder, I am responsible for developing the first version of our product as a proof-of-concept or (ideally) as a functioning alpha/beta version that can be used with real customers to get feedback for our idea and business plan. […]
I’ve returned! After four years of silence here on Fun in Space, I’m going back to blogging. Let me catch you up with what’s been happening for me lately in the technium. I left Clover in June, and have been mostly traveling and doing a variety of non-work related things since then. I’m working on a […]
OK, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here on Fun in Space, but now I have something interesting to show. I experimented a bit with Apple’s new Swift programming language over the weekend and decided to try out accessing Clover’s web services (i.e. the stuff I work on during the day mostly) using […]
I attended Google’s Android Hackathon yesterday on the Google campus. The challenge for this hackathon was to build an Android app to generate memes. Because if there’s one thing the world needs more of, it is definitely meme-generating apps. OK, maybe not, but anyway, that was how the guidelines were presented. I originally wanted to […]
I finally learned about zsh, thanks to a guy named Dietrich Featherston. It’s funny how some of the tools or habits we adopt can stay with us for so long and we often barely think about them. My shell of choice ‘back in the day’ (late 90s-ish) was usually tcsh. The choices we had back […]
I’ve been away from blogging for a while, but I promise I have a good excuse. Shortly after my last post at the end of April, I flew to California for a job interview, and shortly after that, I got a job offer, and shortly after that, I accepted and, well, you get the point. […]
I’ve recently been reading the book Masterminds of Programming, published by O’Reilly. This book contains interviews with the creators of seventeen historic and highly influential programming languages, including C++, Java, Haskell, Objective-C, Python, and many more. I’m about halfway through the book and can highly recommend it. Here are a few good quotations that I […]
OK, I admit it. The biggest thing I knew about Node.js before working with it over the past couple of days was from this video, entitled: “Node.js is Bad Ass Rock Star Tech”. It still cracks me up. However, after watching this intro video by the creator of Node.js and doing a few Google searches, […]
I’ve posted some more code to Github for Project Miracle and now have at least one alternative to Python for web scraping. I decided to use Scala for my second attempt, partly because I want to get better at writing Scala code, and partly because I thought that support for using XML/XHTML would be superior on […]
I spent this past weekend at an event called Startup Weekend. A friend of mine who runs the company KidReports told me about the event and convinced me to sign up. I wasn’t sure what to expect before I arrived, but the event turned out to be very enjoyable and I think I learned quite […]
My first working code for Project Miracle is now posted to Github. Rejoice and be thankful! The code is definitely a work in progress, but I wanted to share some of my initial thoughts on the process so far. I started with the approach that I had described in my earlier post by writing a Python […]
In my quest to acquire the definitive database of Queen songs for Project Miracle, I first thought of turning to MusicBrainz. MusicBrainz is, according to their website, “an open music encyclopedia that collects music metadata and makes it available to the public.” The important aspect of MusicBrainz is that it is completely open, so one […]
Alex Popescu has an interesting post entitled “Programmers Need to Learn Statistics“. He mentions hating having to learn about probability and statistics in college. I never took a statistics course in college, but I did take Probability (Math 361 at UIUC) and let’s just say I did very poorly. So it’s a little disconcerting when […]
OK, so it’s been a few weeks since my last post. In that time, I’ve been doing some more research on getting Project Miracle started. At the risk of stating the obvious, the tricky part of doing data analysis, or any data-intensive project for that matter, is actually acquiring the relevant data to analyze. I […]
Fun in Space and its inspiration. Very meta.
For the machine learning portion of Project Miracle, I may end up trying several different languages and libraries to see which works best. This will also give me a chance to learn more about the various algorithms and approaches. Here are a few I’m considering: R and related libraries: I’ve learned about R through Coursera’s […]
OK, I’ve started this blog in part to motivate me to put together a project that will allow me to tie together several different pieces of technology and subject matter that are of interest to me at the moment. I’d like to build an application that brings together some text processing (including basic text analysis/indexing […]
Welcome to my new technology-related blog called Fun In Space. The blog with this name started out on Blogger many years ago while I tried to figure out what to do with it. I’ve since started Strange Frontier, which has mostly focused on topics related to politics, economics and some philosophy. Here I will write […]
Newer writing lives on Substack.