StackedBoxes.org

So it happened again. After some random event like a system upgrade or power failure(?), what I see upon booting, somehow, is Windows Boot Manager instead of GRUB. Here’s how I fixed it.

Just sharing the OpenMSX settings I am using in order to properly use an Xbox 360 controller. The mappings are optimized for Konami games (in particular, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake).

I’ve been watching and toying a little bit with the Godot game engine for some time now, and it impressed me in several ways. One thing I missed, however, was a satisfying way to write more efficient code in those ever rarer situations in which GDScript¹ couldn’t give the speed I wanted. I could write a module in C++, but this involved recompiling the whole engine and, well, programming in C++.

Now, with the upcoming Godot 3.0 (currently in alpha), a much nicer alternative has been introduced: GDNative. I tested it and it mostly worked. Here’s a summary of my experience.

On the second and final part of this conceptual introduction to Machine Learning (ML), I’ll discuss its relationship with other areas (like Data Science) and describe what I perceive as a common theme among many of the ML algorithms. Emphasis on “what I perceive”: don’t take this as the truth.

“Machine Learning” is not just a buzzword — arguably, it is two. Almost everybody seems to be using Machine Learning (ML) in a way or another, and those who aren’t are looking forward to use it. Sounds like a good topic to know about. I did some nice Neural Network stuff with some colleagues in school in the late 90s¹. Maybe I could just brag that I have nearly 20 years of experience in the field, but this would not be exactly an honest statement, as I didn’t do much ML since then.

Anyway, this is a fun, useful and increasingly important field, so, I guess it is time to do some ML for real. Here’s the first set of notes about my studies, in which I present some important concepts without getting into specific algorithms.

Once upon a time, Peter John Acklam devised a nice algorithm to approximate the quantile function (AKA inverse cumulative distribution function, or inverse CDF) of the normal distribution. He made the algorithm freely available, but unfortunately his page describing it has been timing out for quite a while. So, for reference, here’s a quick overview of his algorithm.

I don’t remember when I created my first homepage, but I know that in 1998 I already had one. It had a mix of content created by myself and those funny things people shared by email back then. I soon dumped all “third-party” content and made my homepage a repository of stuff I created.

This was the philosophical and narcissistic section of my homepage, now converted into a blog post. It has some drops of wisdom uttered by me during the years (from around 1998 until 2012).

Para o deleite de todos, aqui vai minha coleção pessoal de pérolas recolhidas durante campanhas políticas.

I could made this part fit into a single paragraph. Serious, just watch:

Light, textures and shaders are part of the rendering state, so they are handled just as shown in the previous post. Sure, using them requires the use of subclasses of osg::StateAttribute that have not been shown, like osg::Light, osg::Texture2D, and osg::Program, but the idea is the same. So, just spend some time with the Open Scene Graph reference documentation and you are done.