I got a Pi for my birthday! A great excuse to get back into electronics. After unsuccessfully struggling to get the F# compiler to build under the stable version of mono for Debian Wheezy, I realised that F# programs work just fine if you build normally from a windows computer, throw in FSharp.Core.dll in the /bin/ and copy it over. So I have a setup now where I work with VS2012 / Sublime and sync the executable and libraries with WinScp (or indeed the Scp plugin for FAR Manager). Next up is to get access [...]

And the Journey converting “Machine Learning in Action” from Python to F# continues! Rather than following the order of the book, I decided to skip chapters 8 and 9, dedicated to regression methods (regression is something I spent a bit too much time doing in the past to be excited about it just right now), and go straight to Unsupervised Learning, which begins with the K-means clustering algorithm. So what is clustering about? In a nutshell, clustering focuses on the following question: given a set of obs[...]

In spite of being color blind, I am a visual guy – I like to see things. Nothing beats a chart to identify problems in your data. I also spend lots of time manipulating data in FSI, the F# REPL, and while solutions like FSharpChart makes it possible to produce nice graphs fairly easily, I still find it introduces a bit of friction, and wondered how complicated it would be to use Excel as a charting engine. Turns out, it’s not very complicated. The typical use case for generating charts in Excel is to first[...]

YAML’s security risks are in no way limited to Rails or Ruby. YAML documents should be treated as executable code and firewalled accordingly. Deserializing arbitrary types is user-controlled, arbitrary code execution. It’s Not Just Ruby A few weeks ago, I had a need to parse Jasmine’s jasmine.yml in some C# code. I spent some time looking at [...]

The last post contains the description of a sqlMonad. It also happens to contain a silly and obvious (aren’t they all in hindsight) bug. The bug is in implementing the containing CmdSqlBuilder with the IDisposable. While the intent was good (the class wraps resources that should be promptly disposed of – SqlCommand and SqlConnection): there […]