Haja Maideen M

Programming Random Bits

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Story of Aaron, chasing a startup dream in epic style

Recently, Apple acquired a start-up called “BookLamp.com” for approximately $15 million US dollars. It was an usual news for many, as big companies frequently buys small start ups to strengthen their competitive advantage. But this news gave me some sort of happy ending to a story which I started tracking from year 2007 onwards. It is all about chasing a start-up dream, in epic style drama.

It is a story about Aaron Stanton, Founder of BookLamp.com. It is all started with the following blog post from him, sometime during Feb 2007.

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“On February 11th, 2007 I’m getting on a plane to fly to Mountain View, California, headquarters of Google, Inc. Once there, I’m going to try to pitch an idea to them that, I think fits right in with the Google spirit and business model; catch is, I don’t have an appointment, they don’t know I’m coming, and I’m literally going to be showing up at their...

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Free Data sets for machine learning practice

There are many places data sets are available for free, I have collected following links over the periods, many of them for learning purpose, there are few for real serious for problem solving.

UCI have famous data repository at http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/

Very good weather data at for at http://www.knmi.nl/climatology/daily_data/download.html

Data set for different ML problems order in terms of complexity http://college.cengage.com/mathematics/brase/understandable_statistics/7e/students/datasets/slr/frames/frame.html

If you have Wolfarm Alpha pro account, you can download research data in CSV format. For example (Hover your mouse on the plots to get download link) http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=home+prices+folsom+california http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=historical+gold+prices

As previously mentioned, past and current competitions are great source data sets to...

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Swift enters TIOBE index

Swift, new programming language from Apple entered ‘TIOBE Index’, a measure to track popularity of programming languages, for first time at position 16.

‘C’ tops the list as all time favourite, followed by Java, Objective C, C++ and C. When ‘Go’ debut few years ago, it had similar position as ‘Swift’ but later fall behind other languages. ‘Swift’ is in little advantageous situation as it is aimed very specifically towards millions of iOS, Mac OS developers, hopefully it should not face similar fate as ‘Go’. Right now ‘Go’ is at 30 behind Pascal, COBOL. In order to try ‘Swift’, XCode 6 is required, which is in Beta as of today.

TIOBE Index, July ‘14

  1. C
  2. Java
  3. Objective-C
  4. C++
  5. (Visual) Basic
  6. C
  7. PHP
  8. Python
  9. JavaScript
  10. Transact-SQL
  11. Perl
  12. Visual Basic .NET
  13. F
  14. Ruby
  15. ActionScript
  16. Swift
  17. Delphi/Object Pascal
  18. Lisp
  19. MATLAB
  20. Assembly.

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Streaming local media from Mac to Chromecast

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It is seamless to stream media playback with in chrome browser tab, but no straight forward easy way to stream local media content to Chromecast. The experimental desktop sharing from the drop down in Chromecast extension have issues with audio. There are plenty of solutions discussed here.

But one easy solutions I found it working is using Videostream. Install it from here. Though it is a browser extension it doesn’t appear on browser. Launch it from Launchpad, it opens up a browser tab. Select the file and run. Done :)

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Two right (brained) persons, from Apple and Google.

There is no doubt that Apple and Google dominate mobile world, - Apple with vertically closed model of integrated hardware and software and Google with open software and varying different hardware partners, both of them occupy 90% mobile market share overall. Both the companies determine the shape of how future of mobile computing is going to be.

At this juncture, it is noteworthy to take a look at two executives from Apple and Google. Both of them taking center stage recently in designing mobile user experience, by defining the future of how two dominant operating systems user interfaces should look like, and how the user experience should be designed on their respective parent companies’ operating systems.

First, Jonathan Ive, once an industrial design engineer, now Vice president of design at Apple. Second, Matias Duarte, designer of Palm’s WebOS, and now Vice President of Design at...

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Predicting Gold Price - Part 2

Few days back, I shared training data for predicting gold price, it got few users from ML students community, and lot of queries on how I cleaned up the data and models which I used. So I am sharing the training data, test data (after cleaning up).

Training data set here

Feature Columns in Training set

  1. World Gold Production
  2. GNI of China
  3. GNI of India
  4. USD Value
  5. INR VS USD
  6. CNY VS USD
  7. CRUDE OIL Price
  8. World Gold Reserve
  9. DOW Index
  10. Nasdaq Index
  11. S & P 500 Index
  12. Shanghai Index
  13. Sensex Index
  14. Gold Price (Output)

Test Data here have same fields except Gold Price (output), which need to be predicted.

Also the original Gold Price for the test data for verification here

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[We are all connected]

“We are all connected; To each other, biologically. To the earth, chemically. To the rest of the universe atomically.” Neil deGrasse Tyson .

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Compute Continuum finally arrived?

Google and Apple announced its foray into TVs and Autos recently. ‘Compute Continuum’, a phrase spread headed by Intel, which refers to a computing paradigm where an user’s ability to use an application with its last known state across different devices or ability to access applications, its state from any device, appears to be finally arrived.

Few hypothetical scenarios of compute continuum, may be

  1. A video/music start playing from the last played position from any device when the user access the media later point of time from another device.
  2. Accessing phone’s text message from desktop computer or living room TV.
  3. Reading a document from same scroll point from another device.
  4. Answering phone call from desktop when your phone rings.

In a nutshell, compute continuum is ability to use and access an app and its context from another device.

There are challenges in accomplishing compute...

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My Paintings…

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7 Tips for Engineering Managers

Being a good engineering manager to every one reporting to you is very tough job, very difficult to meet everyones expectations. But bigger organizations have good people management trainings (MTP – Managing Through People, Situational Leadership etc), best practices and tools for managing people in effective way, but applying these best practices consciously day to day will be a challenging one. Here is my thoughts for being better Engineering Manager for your people, from my experience or I wish my boss should be like this.

  1. No favoritism: Don’t ever show favoritism to any one. Never. Recognize the good work, but make sure every one understand good work always receive due credit what it deserves.

  2. Equal opportunity: Make sure every one get equal opportunity in the team. Same opportunity for every one may not be possible. But make sure, every one in your team aware that they will get...

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