With our powers combined… sample code!
I never got around to making a proper sample project for my Android USB connection posts (1 and 2).
But, in the wonderful ways that the Internet works, someone has taken my efforts one step further and wrote up some nicer sample code to go with the ideas I dug out. Here’s the tutorial from Nelson Ramirez. I’m glad he found what I did helpful and I want to take a moment to thank him not only for putting up that code, but also for mentioning me in his posts. It’s unfortunate how many people will not do that and take the credit for themselves, so I just wanted to say that I appreciate it.
NaNoWriMo is here!
November 1st is here! A good month for moustaches, getting out your winter coats, preparing for preparations for Christmas and … WRITING!
NaNoWriMo starts today and as I wrote previously, I’m all about that.
One of the things that strikes me about how genius this idea is, is how I felt about it in the last few days. I’m already balancing a lot of “extra” things on top of my regular life. I’m working on an Android app with Marco (while learning Android as well since this is the first app that will hit the market), I’m doing the Stanford online classes and a lot of other smaller things sitting in the “to-do” list as well. Where in the world will I find the time to write a novel?
But if you sit down and think about it… truth is, there isn’t a better time than now. I will never have more time, I will never find myself involved in fewer activities. If I can’t find the time now, quite simply, I will never be able to, which means that I would never write a book, fictional or otherwise. Now this thought I don’t like at all since it’s been a dream of mine since I was very young to write books so clearly I have to find the time! That’s why NaNoWriMo is so great… if one day I have a book published, it’s very possible that I may trace it back to this one moment as that time when it all got started!
The challenge forces me to focus on the pleasant part of writing, which is spewing out my ideas and pretty much completely prevents me from getting writer’s block since I will never stop to edit or worry about quality until the month is over. If I have 50k words on December 1st… that’s a novel ready for editing and that is simply incredible.
It’s only been one day, but so far I’m well on track. I’ll keep updating as the month goes through and I will try to keep a high pace in the beginning, since I expect my “normal” life to get busier towards the second half of the month, so I would rather get more out in the beginning.
So thanks again to NaNoWriMo and to everyone who’s supporting me through this! Now let me get back to writing, I have a kingdom to save!
Online courses
As I have mentioned at some point the past, Stanford is offering some online classes. As far as I know, there are three such classes: artificial intelligence, machine learning and databases.
I joined up the AI and the ML one. This is the third week of classes now, so it’s perhaps time to draw up some initial thoughts.
Both classes are challenging, they put out a lot of material to go through and there are weekly assignments. There seems to be a stronger emphasis on work “in class” or more precisely while watching the lecture videos than in regular classroom courses, but this may depend on your experience (I actually took one or two classes with a similar amount of in-class work). The homeworks so far have seemed rather light (meaning short, not necessarily easy or difficult). I’m guessing it will pick up as we move forward.
I think that the machine learning course is much better in terms of logistics. I can check the progress easier, there’s a discussion forum up on the website, I can watch videos at different speeds and the idea of using slides and a tablet for presentation notes seems much better than hand-writing on paper slides. Also the sound quality is better, but this is just being picky about details, the content is very good from both and well presented.
So I’m quite happy with the classes so far, but it’s a very different experience from a real class (as you may expect). The biggest issue I’m finding is with asking questions. One of the things that I thought was really exciting about these classes was that they were trying to design a system for answering questions that was suppose to push up the most voted/popular questions (since they can’t possibly answer questions from all the students enrolled). Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have happened yet and I think that’s a very important thing that needs to be solved.
I’m looking forward to see how this will work out. Fun fun 
The DRE interface in the news
This piece of news has been sitting as a draft for too long in my archive.
Internet Voting 2.0 and other advances in election technology in Takoma Park
It’s an article describing the technologies that GW developed for use in the Takoma Park election, focusing mostly on the Internet Voting solution, but also on the accessible interface that I’ve worked on.
