Author Archives: Alan V

Various foo

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Went to the Allies movie night tonight and saw Rent. It’s a really good film… makes me kinda want to see the Broadway production now. Dunno.

Work today went well. After trying various optimizations on the classification algorithms, I got accuracy to drop and go up… eventually getting a more-or-less best-for-now accuracy of 91%. Not bad at all. Then worked a bit on the extractor. Initial tests gave it a 49% accuracy on extraction… was able to quickly get it up to 75%, and then spent the rest of the day getting it up to 82%. Going to see if I can’t do better tomorrow. The problem is that the ones its missing now are the problems without explicit givens (for example, “How long was the candle when it started burning?” vs. “How long has it been burning if the candle is 6 inches tall?” which I can parse). Meh. Boo for edge cases and special casing everything.

Um… so yeah. Downloaded some of my favorite Rent songs from iTunes (strangely, I’m not too fond of the cover song, “Seasons of Love,” but that might just because I heard it so many times during the movie). A lot of this suff is really good. This music makes me happy. :) Thinking about either getting an iPod or some card games. Which one do people think would be better? Honestly, I’m not sure how much usage I would get out of either. It would be nice to have all my music on the go with me, but I don’t really *need* an iPod, nor do I have that much time to listen to music when I’m not at my computer anyway. The cards would be nice to collect (and some of them are stuff I’ve been looking for for a while), but unless there’s people to play with me, they’re relatively useless as well.

Havn’t taken any pictures in the past 2 days, so here’s a picture of the cloud factory I took last week. Havn’t photoshopped this one at all… maybe I should a bit. Dunno. I think it looks pretty good as it is.

Life is good :D
I’m so lucky in life. Why do I sometimes lose sight of that?

Work, day 17

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Yeah so, today I got into work, wrote the final code for the number extraction, wrote a test suite for the entire parser, and hit run.
…
And got a ClassCastException.
A little bit of WTFing, and I discovered that what I thought were serialized Classifiers were actually serialized Results. Gaah. Spent about an hour regenerating the actual classifiers (luckily I got a new, faster computer so the experiments didn’t take 2 days…).
Then I hit run again.
Just like that, I had an 85% accuracy on the solution classification. I can raise that by improving my preprocessing (the way I’m currently tagging things is faulty). That’s on my todo list for tomorrow. Then, it’s tracking down the errors and seeing if they are easily fixable.
Notes to self: Add in negative ability (- sign, etc) and allow for multiple numbers in a single span.

So yeah… in the 5 hours I had at work today, I accomplished more than I had for the past 6 work days.

Came home feeling completely happy with myself. Amazing how much work manages to affect my mood, even when I don’t think it does. Yesterday I was feeling kinda meh because I hadn’t gotten much (read: anything) done at work. Today I got a lot done. Yay!
Can’t help but feel like I’m still a little behind, but whatever.

Pounded out a prelimary card list for Student Wars: Internships… not that anyone really cares. Will have cards for the PSLC interns and introduce the PSLC faction… which will do something that I’m not quite sure of yet :-P

Pipe! Whee!

Oh, and PICKLES!!! AHHHHH!!
XD XD XD

And thanks to chrisamaphone… WTF WTF WTF…

Whee

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Nothing interesting happening in my life, so this is a photo post.

I think this is my favorite so far of all my photoshopped shots. Besides being a beautiful shot on its own, the colorizing really makes the people stand out… I dunno. This looks *amazing* full-size. I think it would have been a lot less effective if there were fewer ripples in the puddle… dunno.

This one is much more effective full-size. I was trying to emphasize the people… after all, we’re all small compared to other stuff, but it’s people that really make the world what it is. Hopefully that kinda comes across.

I was taking pictures today and Greg commented on how the things that I picked out as “important” in a picture were unusual. For example, in a picture of a parking lot, I picked out the striped gate-thingies that let cars in and out as the thing I would highlight in a picture. I don’t know why they stood out to me, exactly… they just seemed like the right thing to emphasize.
Unfortunately, both shots of it came out blurry, so I guess we’ll never know… but I was reminded of the conversation as I was looking over the second photo. It now occurs to me that it’s rather unusual to choose to highlight the people over everything else in the photo. As I was doing it, however, they were the natural choice.
Hmmm…

I really need to make an “art” section of my site for all these photoshops (so I can post them bigger) and my photos from photo classes. Meh.

The world is full of beauty. I’m learning to take time when I’m out walking to really take in everything and enjoy it… and hopefully capture some of it in a photo.
…have I succeeded?