Archive for February, 2008

Finally finished reading through Block 4 of M366 on Neural Networks.

Fascinating stuff, I particularly enjoyed the way you can train a simple network to sort complicated input patterns into the right categories etc.

Elman’s word clustering in his semantic experiments is amazing, especially the way that the network clusters related words into lexical groups while it is being trained to guess the next letter in a sequence!

Anyway, now that I am ahead of schedule with this course, I can now finish off reading the other courses’ books before continuing with the assignments.

I’ve been creating automatic documentation for the Entertainer project using Doxygen.
As you may know, Entertainer is written in python, so what follows is a short guide to commenting python code in a format that Doxygen will pick up.

Here’s a funny video clip for you all:

Went bouldering tonight at the Nottingham Indoor Climbing Centre so I’m typing with really sore fingers!

Its been a while since I’ve been climbing and I could only manage 5a graded routes.

There was this kid there, who couldn’t have been older than 11/12, doing lead climbing on one of far end overhanging walls. He was very good and his dad, who was belaying, told me not only was he in the top 10 or 15 for his age group but he’d only been climbing 14 months!

Anyway, my arms are killing me so I’d better cut this post short. I’m intending to start climbing regularly again and build back up to the 6a’s which I could just about manage a year and a half ago.

Lauri has written a comprehensive review of the recent work on Entertainer and the work done so far on it. I especially like the new effects for viewing albums covers that he has written recently (see the example above).

As well as continuing coding the rss feed support, I’ve added Entertainer to several project trackers including ohloh.net and cia.vc

I’m going to be working on cleaning up the rss feed code and documentation this and I’ll hopefully finish it in time for the coding sprint in early March.

Played with the Smokin’ Aces Div 4 team this weekend at the UK Masters Paintball Tournament. We won 5 of our 9 games and finished 1 point off 4th in 5th place.

It was in Lincoln and in the morning it was freezing, there was so much frost in the grass carpark that you could do some fantastic handbrake turns, it was like driving in snow!

Needless to say we had a bit of trouble with the paintball markers as the frost had frozen the lubricant and the o-rings inside the markers and Chris ended up having to sit in the car with the heaters on trying to warm up his marker.

We managed to get everything together in time for the first game and started off with a run of four wins before lunch and then lost 4 games before finishing off the day with a win.

Meanwhile in Div 2, the Smokin’ Aces Elite team managed to finish 5th as well so it was a great day overall.

We had a coding sprint on the Entertainer project over the weekend.

We got the video thumbnailer working and I’ve added liferea support to the feed viewer.

Take a look at the project at http://code.google.com/p/entertainer-media-center/

I was recently generating some documentation from the Entertainer source code and decided to share how I managed to do it.

I’m assuming python 2.4 is installed on your system.

First install doxygen and graphviz

Found this new video tutorial site for Guitars, Drums and Keyboards.

Looks interesting…

www.ivideosongs.com