Here's what happened: My phone started acting up. The lock button turned into a 'maybe turn the phone off' button. The unlock button turned into a 'maybe turn the phone off, or open the camera?' button. I impulse-purchased a new phone, and the old one magically fixed itself. New phone …

I have been setting myself up on a new computing cluster (CentOS 6.7), so I'm in the lovely land of installing things without root. tmux proved a bit frustrating, so here's what I ended up doing: install libevent tmux needs this, I didn't have it (you might, so try …

I started writing this in Phoenix airport, so if the current trend (n=2) continues, I'll start recounting my next conference half-way through, with interesting implications for the latter half of the post. This was my first time attending the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence Conference (AAAI), so …

I'm upgrading my paper-management workflow from 'labyrinth of folders' to an Evernote + Zotero mix. I already use Evernote a little for this by writing paper summaries in it, but I would rather do the 'heavy duty' management and organisation in Zotero. So, I'd like to easily switch between the Evernote …

I got back from Montreal yesterday. I was at the Twenty-ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) - a rather large gathering of people interested in machine learning, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and related topics. It's an academic conference, and it is intense. Many wonderful conversations were had, things learned …

I have been learning Esperanto lately (see here). One of the really cool features of the language is affixes. Basically, you can create new words using some simple morphological rules, e.g.: bona (good) → bonulo (good person) juna (young) → junulo (young person) vorto (word) → vortaro (group of words = dictionary/vocabulary …

Esperanto is a constructed international auxiliary language designed to be simple and easy to learn. It achieves this by having a small vocabulary and very regular grammar. It's quite influenced by Indo-European (particularly Romance) languages, so knowing some of those helps a lot. This post is not intended to be …

Last weekend I presented with two friends (huertanix and Caroline Sinders) at the first ever Radical Networks conference. Our talk was originally called 'Blogging on the Darknet' but after a questionably productive co-working session we changed it to 'I Will Follow You Into the Darknet', after a Death Cab for …

I recently attended the Machine Learning Summer School at the MPI in Tübingen. This wasn't my first time at an event like this - I attended the Gaussian Process 'Summer' School in September 2014 - but the MLSS is a lot bigger/diverse. I'm fairly sure I didn't even speak to all …

Lazily trying to paste a long list of strings into python, which means I need things wrapped in quotes (and commas, but I'm excluding them from this example cause they're easy). Grabbing the strings from a file using awk, but since quotes (apostrophes) are special in awk this messes things …