Since paxprose hasn't posted one in awhile I thought I'd revive this, as I enjoyed getting to see what everyone else is working on.
I'm currently working on the same two projects that I was last time, though have made significant progress on both. I'm now one of the quasi experts on that communication protocol, having gotten two machines to talk to each other and moved on to write the receiver and am now working on the more complex sender.
For my other project I'm currently trying to shoehorn more logging and monitoring into the disruptor pattern without mucking things up.
As a side note, I'd like to curse ClearCase and I hope you all can use something more sane.
I'm still learning Python via Codecademy, so I'm reviewing before I tackle the first unguided lesson. I'm finding even basic coding to be quie enjoyable!
It can become addicting. Just make sure to pace yourself and make sure you've got a handle on what they're covering in each lesson. Additionally, there will be some pretty boring parts, but work through it and before you know it you'll be able to do things you've never dreamed of!
Gah!, the big block on Code academy for me has been getting the classes to actually load. They constantly crash. I'm reading python the hard way now instead, with a side course in computer programming for everybody to try to understand the basics.
I'm working on the mypy static type checker, for PEP 484 Today I rebased two interdependent patchsets (testsuite driver enhancements and xml reports) into a different order. I'm also working on a separate patchset to efficiently add column-tracking info and generally improve the error message system. I don't usually like having so many outstanding patchsets, but the maintainer is on vacation.
Converting logic between two different Distributed Controls Systems.
I do automation engineering for manufacturing companies. I'm currently in the process of migrating all of the programming logic/code for a papermachine. Essentially reading the logic from a Metso DCS and reprogramming it in a Honeywell DCS. Because the client is upgrading and switching the system over.
I'll be prototyping with an Espruino Pico which is a JavaScript micro controller. Just got most of the parts today.
It was built in-house, so I can't actually name it, but it's essentially a layer that exposes some Java methods, while leaving what actual network protocol to be used up to the infrastructure/sysops teams. I'm pretty much just pulling levers in Java to make it jump through my hoops. A step up from CORBA, but like all new things it's having trouble gaining traction.
I've been playing around with programming tools that I can use in teaching, most recently I have been using Python with MCPI on a Spigot server running the RaspberryJuice mod. I've found Martin O'Hanlon's blog really helpful and am slowly learning how I could use this to give an engaging lesson. My hope is to have everything setup to the point that I could host several lessons or an after school club, having the students play together and work through programmatic challenges. I'm not sure on how I will do that yet: I don't want students mucking up each others work area, or the server, but also want them to have some freedom and not drive extra work for myself checking their code constantly.
There's several ways to keep them seperated from each other. I'm not sure what all your set up looks like, but if you're running Linux just keeping them as unprivileged users should be pretty effective at keeping them from tredding on each other's toes. As far as your server set up goes, I'm not familiar with Spigot servers, but if RaspberryJuice isn't too memory intensive you can have several versions running, listening on different ports, that way they can even send and see their stuff without having to wait in line.
I meant workspace within the minecraft world, ideally they would all work on one or two big projects in the game and use the python scripts to either help them build or to provide some interesting interactivity. The only issue with that is they're more likely to use it to grief each other, there may be the possibility of having each player put onto their own map but that would increase the memory requirements quite heavily. The setup I have in mind would be students working in teams of two or three, coding python locally on one machine and playing minecraft on another, both of which connected to one central server. At the moment I'm running it all on my course provided laptop and it is just about capable of handling one user and a python script, my hope is that when I actually have a classroom available there will be some resources available to me. Otherwise I could replace the server component here with a Raspberry pi running the minecraft pi server, though I do not know if multiple computers are able to connect to it or not.
Ah, yeah, I don't know how to really help there. If you figure out how to stop griefing you'll be able to retire rich. Best I can figure is to make it one large, module thing, witch each team working on one part, that way they're not competing, hopefully reducing some of the grief.
The best hope is that by having them build parts of the same system in that multiplayer environment, that they'd feel enough ownership of the system not to wreck it all. I'll definitely have to put in a world backup system but the real limiting factor of any solution would be that python script access. I wonder if I could set up some form of authentication and logging so all scripts could be traced back to whoever runs them, I have little experience with Python but I guess the libraries are all accessible so it may be possible to just add it in. Actually: thinking on it, I could have a gatekeeper so they authenticate with my server which will then pass the connection on to the actual Spigot+RaspberryJuice server perhaps? Otherwise I'd have to modify the RaspberryJuice mod as well, which I suppose is just Java so I'm fairly confident I could do that... blargh.
Yeah, the joint ownership was what I was trying to get across. And setting up a simple proxy that logs who does what shouldn't be too hard, that way you don't have to add hooks to what's already there and can have it all in a central place. And nightly backups of the server shouldn't be too much of a pain and that way even if a troll does muck things up your students only lost a few hours of work.
There's plugins to auto-backup and do all sorts of world management; ultimately I want them to have fun making something, if I can teach them logic gates and programming then all the better. If I can teach them other things such as some basics of architecture or geography, then that's even better!
I'm doing a corpus analysis to look at how word repetition is influenced by the phrase it appears in. I got some preliminary results with a small number of items but I really need to scale things up. I'm thinking of switching my preprocessing code to Python because R is just too goddamn slow for this sort of thing. I've also been itching to try Julia and this project might be a good excuse to do that. Has anyone here used Julia before?
Can you expand on what you're actually trying to do? I'm having trouble parsing your first sentence. As far as switching to Python, I know one of my old professors working on big data stuff really liked it, so there's at least that endorsement. Unfortunately I can give more than that. I like my languages statically typed.
Yeah that was not nearly enough detail! I do research in the field of psycholinguistics and I'm currently designing an experiment that tests how we use mental representations of phrases during language processing and production. In this case, I've hypothesized that words which appear in highly frequent phrases undergo less "lexical priming" -- that is, activating a strong multiword representation reduces the amount of activation for any one of the individual words within the single phrase. (Assuming that "representation strength" scales in a nice way with expression frequency, which we have some evidence for). This is based on some provocative data I got in a previous experiment, but that experiment wasn't explicitly designed to test this hypothesis so I'm designing another one! As a first step, I'm analyzing naturally occurring speech data in a corpus of telephone conversations to see if my hypothesis is supported in natural data, then if it's promising I'm going to do a tightly controlled experiment in the lab. Unfortunately, doing fancy calculations on hundreds of thousands of rows is a huge pain in the ass for the language I'm most comfortable with, R. R is great for statistical analysis but is painfully slow otherwise...
Idioms are difficult to use to study this precisely because they have different possible meaning. I'm talking about phrases that appear to still be fully compositional, but are very frequent with words that co-occur together more than expected by chance - some examples are "parmesan cheese", " academic achievement ", " good job", etc.
Lots of hustle and bustle at work but I'm trying to finish up drafts for my Fulbright-Clinton application. Drafts are due to our advisors Aug 1. I had been trying to avoid coming down to the wire, but I always do that so here we are.
Thank you! I work adjacent to foreign service officers right now (I'm civil service). It's not the exact route I want to take but I've learned a hell of a lot in the last year.
A whole lot of broken bullshit that I'm not allowed to talk about. All I'm going to say is that the more time passes, the more I lose faith in our clients' ability to make a proper product... At home I'm working, with a few people, on making a game on which I can't say much either.
As explained by the guy who started it (who is also the CEO of the upstart company), "it's a game that plans to put the RP back in MMORPG". So a MMORPG that will focus more deeply about player interaction and communities than grinding. I would have said instead of story - but that would be a lie since we're planning to let players unfurl their own aside from what we've planned. But I can't tell much more - all I can do is keep you posted for any public updates.
I've been trying to make something that generates, on demand, a course schedule as a .ics file, that students can download, for my university. It's harder than I thought it'd be. Also, screwing up my home computer by trying to configure xmonad just how I want it, somehow...