In the last three months of the last year I had the pleasure of taking part in an online machine learning course, taught by prof. Andrew Ng of the Stanford University. The course is already over, so it might seem old news, but next edition should start any time now. If the topic of machine learning seems interesting to you in any way I can really recommend it.
For my classes I recorded screencasts about TDD, and, because lately I’m focused mostly on c++, I decided to dive into google test instead of the regular jMock and Mockito. Initially I wanted to make it a tutorial showcasing all the tools within the library, but it ended up being a TDD Kata solving example with a short introduction about how to set up the development environment.
This thursday, in the lecture hall of the Biology Departament of University of Warsaw, Google organized a meetup with their engineers, celebrating the official launch of their new office in Warsaw. The event started with Joshua Bloch’s, lecture, which was a treat for the attendees, most of whom were MIM UW students, almost filling the room.
Joshua presented code snippets that don’t do what you might expect them to, by invoking constructs that may lead to unforseen behavior. Majority of those constructs weren’t Java-exclusive and could have been presented in C++ or even python. The well known issues were covered, e.g. String comparison, operator precedence, working with floating-point variables, implicit conversion. But there also were topics I haven’t ever thought about, like regular expressions that match same patterns but differ hugely in their efficiency.
Some time ago I described a script you could use to see who’s using your laptop when you’re not around. I sadly (?) didn’t catch any robbers using it, but the whole setup already took nearly 4000 photos, some of which might be a little interesting:
I’ve got a series or two of one person sitting in front of the computer for quite some time and I could use it to create a timelapse similar to those I made using my crude blackberry app, but on the other hand maybe I shouldn’t be picking on my friends…
I was talking to a friend of mine and we came up with the idea of “America’s next top model” and Top Coder crossover. The “top model” shows are slowly losing their popularity, but our idea is still scary on the wallpaper of my desktop, motivating me to hard work:
Half of the idea and the whole design is courtesy of Jakub Rostkowski, and the wallpaper comes in three different sizes: 1440×900, 1600×1200, 1900x1200,
