I haven't written a public blog post in four months because I have been busy moving to another state and starting a new job at Capital One (Master Software Engineer, role is tech lead and manager of a small machine learning team). Life has been really good: excitement of new job challenges and Carol and I have been enjoying the university town of Urbana/Champaign Illinois. I am also finishing up two course specializations at Coursera: Probabilistic Graph Models and Deep Learning. The deep learning class series is just a review for me, and in contrast I find the PGM class series very challenging (I am taking these PGM classes at a slow and relaxed pace - Coursera lets you split classes to multiple sessions). I am reading two books that I can highly recommend: François Chollet's book "Deep Learning with Python" that serves as an idea book for advance use of deep learning using Keras. François is the creator of the Keras framework and his new book is a treasure store...

I have recently spent some time playing around in Pharo Smalltalk and in the process made some improvements to my NLP library: I changed the license to MIT and added summarization and sentence segmentation. Older code provides functionality for part of speech tagging and categorization. Code, data, and directions are in my github repository nlp_smalltalk . My first experience with Smalltalk was early 1983. The year before my company had bought a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine for me and a Xerox technical sales person offered me a one month trial license for their Smalltalk system. Pharo Smalltalk very much impresses me both for its interactive programming environment and also for the many fine libraries written for it. I don't spend much time programming in the Pharo environment so I am very far from being an expert. That said, I find it a great programming environment for getting code working quickly.

I haven't been using Lisp languages much in the last five or six years since I started using Ruby or Haskell more often to experiment with new ideas and projects. Now that I am winding down my remote consulting business (more detail later) I want to spend more time writing: I have three book projects that I am currently working on: "Practical Scheme Programming (Using Chez Scheme and Chicken Scheme)" , "Ruby Programming Playbook" ,  and a fourth edition update to " Loving Common Lisp, or the Savvy Programmer's Secret Weapon" . All three of these books will be released using a Creative Commons no commercial reuse, no modifications, share with attribution license, so copies of these eBooks can be shared with your friends. I was very excited when the fantastic Chez Scheme system was open sourced but some of the excitement was soon tempered by the time required to get much of my existing Scheme code running under Chez Scheme and  R6RS. To be hon...

I have been enjoying Nassim Taleb's book 'Antifragile' in which I have learned (or better understood) how difficult to impossible it is to predict the future, especially events with a low probability. Taleb does convince that it is possible and desirable to rate personal habits, health issues, business, governments, etc. as to how fragile robust antifragile they are. Robust is good, antifragile is even better. It is fragile, for example, to depend on the salary from one company to support your family while investing heavily in that company's stock. It is more robust having a side business to earn extra money and to broadly distribute long term investments. It is antifragile to own multiple businesses. Taleb argues, and I agree, that it is better to earn less but have safer more distributed income streams. Personally, I have three businesses: software development consulting, writing books, and I am a landlord for income properties. I am in the process of opening a fo...

Happy New Year everyone! We live in interesting times. We are witnessing exponential growth in technologies and social and economic change. I am going to share my personal views on these two topics and then conclude with my plans for 2017 for leading a free and inspired life. It is difficult for us humans to really understand exponential growth, as we are seeing in artificial intelligence and other technologies like genetic engineering. One personal way to come to grips with exponential growth is to conduct a thought experiment: compare the technological changes in the world between the times you were ten and twenty years old and the changes in technology in the last ten years. Even a few years ago my cellphone did a fairly poor job at understanding my spoken speech and now it understands me almost perfectly and speech input is now the way that many of us interact with our mobile devices. In my field of machine learning and artificial intelligence, deep learning neural networks hav...

Most of my sites have no dynamic content but I often still hosted them as a Ruby Sinatra app or use PHP. A few years ago I experimented with using the static site generator Jekyll but still hosted the generated site on one of my own servers using nginx. After a while I decided to revert the site to its old implementation as a Sinatra web app (even though the site was always static, that is, no server side actions required except for serving up static HTML, JS, and CSS files). I am now using a far superior setup, and I am going to document this new setup to document it for myself, and perhaps other people may find this useful also: I chose to use Google Cloud Storage for personal reasons (I used to work as a contractor at Google and I fondly remember their infrastructure, and using GCP is slightly similar) but using Amazon S3 or Microsoft Azure  is also simple to set up. Start by installing Harp and a static site local web server: npm install -g harp npm install -...

My new Haskell book Haskell Tutorial and Cookbook  is now available for a minimum price of $4. This book has a Creative Commons share and share alike, no commercial use license - so you can legally (and with my blessings) share it with your friends.

Those of you who know me in "real life" might remember me talking about how much I enjoyed Rushkoff's newest book that was published recently. Well, he just put out a short video that summarizes many of the useful and interesting best-parts of the book:  YouTube Link I especially like the part where he explains why family owned businesses are so much more stable than other businesses. Makes sense. He also explains the flow of how the economy has worked since the dark ages, and how modern technology platforms, while a mostly good thing, necessitate doing things differently now, or else. Anyway, enjoy the video, or not :-)

Well, at least I am amazed. I took a brief look at Julia  a few years ago but since I understood it to be somewhat derivative of GNU/Octave (or Matlab) and R (I sometimes use GNU/Octave, but not often), I only gave Julia a very short look. Fortunately, a current customer uses Julia so I have been ramping up on the language and I very much like it. A bit off topic but I would like to give a shout-out to the  O'Relly Safari Books Online service  which I recently joined when they had a $200/year guaranteed for life subscription price (half regular price). I am reading "Getting Started with Julia" by Ivo Balbaert which is fine for now. I have "Julia for Data Science" by Zacharias Voulgaris   and "Mastering Julia" by Malcolm Sherrington in my reading queue. When learning a new technology having up to date books available really is better than finding information on the web (or at least augmentation to material on the web). I very much like the tooling f...

My wife and I are watching the closing ceremonies right now. Great visual effects that will be even better with immersive virtual reality. I expect that in 8 years we will have the option of being able to change our point of view from the stands to down on the central floor in a complete immersive VR experience with 3D sound and head tracking. I haven't worked in VR in almost 20 years when I helped found the virtual reality systems division at SAIC (where I handled 3D sound with head related transfer functions, motion, haptics, and some graphics) and then a year later did a virtual reality project for Disney while working at Angel Studios. Even if I don't work in VR anymore I am a huge fan and I have high expectations for what is to come in user experience.

I attended the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics conference last June in San Diego.  Here is a link to the published papers. The conference was great. The keynote talks, panel discussions, and the talks I attended were interesting! As an independent consultant I payed my own way to the conference and I found it to be a good investment. Sometime I would enjoy attending a European chapter of the ACL conference.

I am a practical developer. I do have my favorite programming languages (Ruby, Haskell, Clojure, and Java) but I tend to look first at what libraries are available in different languages for whatever project I am currently working on. I did a lot of work in machine learning in the 1980s (mostly in neural networks) and since then I have probably spent about 30% of my work time directly working on machine learning problems. That has changed in the last few years since several of my consulting customers wanted help spinning up on machine learning. I have used Scala a fair amount but it has never been a "favorite language," mostly because I didn't care for the tooling. Now I find myself motivated to use Scala because of the awesome Apache MLlib and Breeze machine learning libraries. Also, I have solved my "tooling problem" for Scala development; if you are interested here is my setup: I use a remote high-memory, high-CPU server instance for fast builds. I used t...