Category archives: Snaking

So of all the Web Toys, the only one that seems to have staying power so far is the trivial wrapper around espeak Say What. Something about having a robotic voice parrot back whatever you type is really exciting for kids.

I downloaded the TEDLIUM speech corpus last night, and this afternoon I poked around in it and said grr. It uses a NIST Sphere format which is basically a plain-text header followed by encoded samples... it's a WAV file, but with far fewer useful tools. Oh well, thinks I, I'll just transcode the files into ...

So there's a big flamey thread over on python-list about the Python 3.x type-annotation. Thing is, I can't say the annotations seem all *that* important to the behaviour (static type checking): Consider this Python 2.7 decorator-set:

def _func_annotation_for(func):
    """Retrieve the function annotation for a given function or create it"""
    current = getattr(func,'func_annotation',None)
    if current is ...

I continued my long reading in Neural Networks today. I'm now setup with Theano, and working through the DeepLearning.net tutorials... but wow, I was not prepared for the (lack of) speed. Hours and hours to train a network (I don't have an nVidia GPU, so everything is being done on the CPU); my very first ...

I'm finally sitting down and looking at how to implement Neural Networks (LeNet) in Python (much of the motivation coming from Anatoly's comment). I've been very slowly following along with Learning from Data from CalTech (since October?!), but honestly that dragged on so long without getting to useful code that I found it harder ...

So I've spent the afternoon going through my backlog of emails regarding PyOpenGL issues. That takes far longer than it should, as most of the time is really spent in reproducing/verifying problems rather than actually addressing issues. So far I think I've addressed most of the items that can be addressed near-term, so I guess ...

Been playing around a bit with web-sockets under Twisted. This time I didn't go with autobahn, as the last time I played with it I just wound up stuck on lots of stuff I didn't need. What I decided to play with is a Web Socket based server-controlled messaging daemon. It's *not* going to run ...

So we have a lot of Django-based code where we'd like the user to be able to download a (subset of) the Django database as a "config file", then upload that "config file" to some number of other machines (or the original one), potentially long after the database has been migrated. I've got the skeleton ...

I wanted to get back to doing a bit of React.js, so I started converting more of the WebToys into React (from Angular and raw Jquery). It took a bit of staring at old code to remember the React way of things. There are definitely some things I need to get sorted; how to parameterize ...

So today I started into the basic command-and-control part of the Listener system. The original tack I took was to create escaped commands inside the text stream using the "typing" substitutions (the stuff that converts ,comma into ','):

some text \action_do_something more text

But that got rather grotty rather fast when looking at corner cases ...