Friday, May 23, 2008

Sub-reddit for Systems Science and OR

I've been a big fan of Reddit's Programing subsite for a while. Just this morning I found another sub-reddit:
SYSOR: Systems Science, Operations Research and Everything In Between, and I'm loving it. Lots of links on data mining, graph software, image recognition, learning theory, etc etc.

Not sure if the Operations Research part in the title is so big now -- there's some sort of complicated reorganization of a number of fields including operations research, systems science, computational learning, and more general computer science areas. I'm a fan of the great historical overview in the Introduction in Rusell and Norvig's AI book; I'm sure it's slanted in various ways, but what else are overarching narratives for? :)

Monday, May 19, 2008

conplot - a console plotter

This has to be the most quick-and-dirty data visualizer out there: I wrote an ascii art plotter script that takes a column of numbers on stdin and throws out a plot on your console. I've been using it for several months to quickly look at numbers on the commandline, especially from logs and such. (Back in school I would use gnuplot for this; R is good too. But sometimes you want to move really fast, esp if you have a few hideous perl -pe one-liners on your hands and mucking around with temp files will interrupt your flow.)

Link: github.com/brendano/conplot

"Demo":


$ cat time.log | conplot
14601
oooooooo
oooooo
ooooooooo
oooooooooooo
11269 oooooooo
oooo
ooo
oooo
oo
ooo
7271 ooooo
oooo
oooo
oooo
oooo
oooo
3272 oo
o
o
oo
ooo
ooo
-726 0 76826


I must say, it's way easier to throw up some code on GitHub than on to SourceForge, which is the only other open source code hosting service I've used. I guess Google Code is their biggest competitor in that respect; I haven't tried it.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

The best natural language search commentary on the internet

With Powerset's launch, there's an awful lot of hot air and crappy blog posts about natural language search being written. Instead of contributing to that mess, I prefer to direct the reader to the best writing on the topic that I've seen: Fernando Pereira's posts on search.