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Just some thoughts by a guy you don't know.
Also, you should definitely hire me!
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Weeklog for Week 45: November 08 to November 14

Progress

Work is going not as fast as I had hoped, but it goes ahead.

The hackathon I had planned to attend was converted to virtual-only because of COVID. But it worked out quite well. We made a lot of progress and found some really exciting solutions. I'm looking forward to what the teams make of it afterwards.

PlantEd

I unpacked my stuff. That's as far as I got.

NTS

I read up on CSG geometry. Quite complicated, all that, but at their core, the algorithms are simple. CSG could well be the differentiator this project needs.

What if we "pre-solve" the most common cases and then just disallow all others? Like, a handful of cuts with certain parameter areas and everything else is just not possible?

Articles

Libraries, programming, etc

  • Excalideck: Excalideck is an app for authoring slide decks that look hand-drawn. Excalideck is based on Excalidraw.
  • Hamilton: The micro-framework to create dataframes from functions. Specifically, Hamilton is a framework that allows for delayed executions of functions in a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). This is meant to solve the problem of creating complex data pipelines. Core to the design of Hamilton is a clear mapping of function name to implementation. That is, Hamilton forces a certain paradigm with writing functions, and aims for DAG clarity, easy modifications, unit testing, and documentation.
  • Paperless-ng: a document store that looks simple and useful enough that I might be tempted to install it somewhere.
  • Shiny by RStudio: "Shiny is an R package that makes it easy to build interactive web apps straight from R. You can host standalone apps on a webpage or embed them in R Markdown documents or build dashboards. You can also extend your Shiny apps with CSS themes, htmlwidgets, and JavaScript actions." A customer showed me their interactive page powered by Shiny. It was really amazing and interactive and cool. Now I'm envious and want to have something like that for Python...
  • plotly Dash: is somewhat similar to Shiny, except not really. I should do more with Dash, it is awesome.
  • Dash Core Components for Visualization.: Network and Datatable views for Dash
  • High-level tools to simplify visualization in Python: HoloViz provides a set of Python packages that make viz easier, more accurate, and more powerful: Panel for making apps and dashboards for your plots from any supported plotting library, hvPlot to quickly generate interactive plots from your data, HoloViews to help you make all of your data instantly visualizable, GeoViews to extend HoloViews for geographic data, Datashader for rendering even the largest datasets, Param to create declarative user-configurable objects, and Colorcet for perceptually uniform colormaps.
  • Pyodide: Python with the scientific stack, compiled to WebAssembly. Pyodide may be used in any context where you want to run Python inside a web browser. Pyodide brings the Python 3.9 runtime to the browser via WebAssembly, along with the Python scientific stack including NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, SciPy, and scikit-learn. Over 75 packages are currently available. In addition it’s possible to install pure Python wheels from PyPi. Pyodide provides transparent conversion of objects between Javascript and Python. When used inside a browser, Python has full access to the Web APIs.
  • Apache Zeppelin: Another notebook server. I am unclear on why this should be used instead of Jupyter.
  • Fast Random Integer Generation in an Interval: "Pseudo-random values are usually generated in words of a fixed number of bits (e.g., 32 bits, 64 bits) using algorithms such as a linear congruential generator. We need functions to convert such random words to random integers in an interval ([0,s)) without introducing statistical biases. The standard functions in programming languages such as Java involve integer divisions. Unfortunately, division instructions are relatively expensive. We review an unbiased function to generate ranged integers from a source of random words that avoids integer divisions with high probability."
  • Rotation by Shearing: "What follows are my own notes on Alan Paeth's "A Fast Algorithm for General Raster Rotation," as published in the proceedings of Graphics Interface '86. This is a very popular algorithm for image rotation, used by many libraries such as ImageMagick, pnmrotate, etc. Initially I hoped that this scheme would be suitable for use in scientific data processing where arrays must be rotated, but now I believe that this scheme is unsuitable due to the poor interpolation. I also question whether this is any faster than bilinear interpolation when run on general purpose hardware (due to the large amount of data movement); however I do not yet have any quantitative measurements. These concerns aside, the decomposition of a rotation into three shears is interesting in its own right."

Books

  • Dark Matter by Black Crouch: I like the premise. The book, so far, does not satisfy me. I liked recursion very much, but this one... meh. I'm still hoping it'll pick up, though.

Games

  • Journey to the Savage Planet with Anton: beautiful and whimsical exploration, and then all of a sudden, loads of stuff to do. Great two-player game. The only downside is that there's no map. 9/10
  • Alba, Wildlife Adventure: cute little exploration game about snapping photos of animals. 7/10

Other media

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