Posts

If the “mood” of the previous lessons was about Inference, I can only say that the current are about “smoothing”, “occam’s razor” and “perceptron”. 3 concepts that will remain with you even after having forgotten about all this (check it out below :-P). My notes of Lesson 5 My notes of Lesson 6 Enjoy the notes and, again, do Lesson 5, than complete the Homework, than study Lesson 6. UPDATE Sat 05 Nov 2011: I just finished putting down the notes of Lesson 6, and you can find the link above. ...

This week the ai-class was about Probability, Bayes Networks and Inference. For people like me, that have to find patches of free time to study this course, there is a good news: you can do Homeworks 2 just by studying the first of the 2 lessons. This can help to prioritise your schedule, and study the second lesson (that focuses on the “computation” over Bayes Networks) with a little bit more peace of mind. ...

Recently the online class “Introduction to Artificial Intelligente” has began. Prof. Sebastian Thrun and Prof. Peter Norvig, from Stanford University, are offering it for free. And I’m enjoying every minute of it. The idea is to trasport to the web the same course that they are teaching in person at Stanford. Almost simultaneously. One of the great notes from larvecode. It’s in my opinion a great experiment: there are 160,000 students, and will be interesting to see how it pans out. The two profs are doing their best to “leverage the scalability of the web”, instead of trying to retrofit the web into the class. That is smart. And gives them more chances of success. ...

I’m just back from a very good conference. And for once, I can proudly say, it was organized by Italians! The host were WEBdeBS, a web company based in lovely Brescia, and the topic was… very hot: Node.JS. Node.JS Conference (@nodejsconfit) (on joind.in) has been hosted in the Centro Paolo VI, where talks well complemented by lovely Italian food. What else can you ask? A great addition to my collection of “hackshirts” ...

I was on the train to Portsmouth, and listening-reading the book “In the Plex”. In the Part 2 of the book, Chapter 2 if I recall correctly, the author is talking about Google and the Ocean project, what is later on going to be know as Google Books. The part that got me thinking is when Page, Brin and Mayer are trying to work out how actually they can scan the physical books, in a scalable manner. To the Googlers, hiring a lot of human beings and a lot of scanner didn’t look like a scalable solution at all! So they decided to work on their own scanner, using the hardware building expertise that years of Google Data Center made them acquire. ...

Today I got a nice surprise in the post at work: my “Tote Lounger” had arrived. Few months ago I decided to contribute to a Kickstarter Project by 2 friends of mine: SketchChair. The two guys are Greg and Tiago, and they run Diatom Studio. Here is a quote from their Kickstarter page: Diatom is a design studio that is exploring the possibilities of interaction, digital fabrication and computational design. We both graduated from the industrial design program at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Greg Saul is a designer, programmer and maker who wants to challenge the roles of the consumer and designer through his work, and was a visiting researcher at the JST ERATO Design UI Project in Tokyo. Tiago Rorke has spent time teaching and researching all things digital fabrication as a teaching fellow at Victoria University, and much of his work explores the boundaries between the art and design worlds. ...

In Betfair we are building all sort of new things, and one of the aspects on which we are trying to focus more is doing Automated Tests for JavaScript. Currently, all non-js code in Betfair passes through different kind of Automated (and Human) Testing (from Unit Testing, to Security, to Performance, to Human and Scripted QA), but the JavaScript language, by its very nature, makes it tricky to test in an automated fashion. It’s not impossible, just a bit harder than it should. ...

A team of smart, young, tech-savvy Lybians have given life to an amazing little (but already growing) project: collect, translate and share news from the ground of Libya. The project is this news/blog: http://www.libyahurra.info/. Libya Hurra I said smart. They have leveraged something that everyone of us (well, people of the world) have: friends from somewhere else. They asked friends to take on the easy task to translate some articles every day, and send back for publication on the blog. I’m giving a hand with the Italian translations every time I can. ...

I had it. I’m sick and tired of this nonsense. People, Devs in the specific, should pull their head out of their ass right now and act like adults. What am I on about? I’m about re-factored, recompiled languages. Stuff like CoffeShit (yeah, Coffee-SHIT - so what?). Who the fuck cares? Come on people, are we really saying that the grammar of a language makes you a better/smarter/faster developer? This is BULLSHIT! Grammar has nothing to do with the quality of your code or with your development speed. NOTHING! ...

In the last month or two I started contributing to PhantomJS: PhantomJS logo PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector, JSON, Canvas, and SVG. PhantomJS is an optimal solution for headless testing of web-based applications, site scraping, pages capture, SVG renderer, PDF converter and many other use cases. The project is really interesting and we are seeing a steady growth in terms of: ...