Personally, I do not believe in concept of teaching. Humans are smart and intelligent animals and as such, they are capable of learning new things themselves based on their experience and observations. Thus, rather than providing a training, I preferred sharing my experience and knowledge on ANN with the members attending the course.

Considering the fact that this event was organized for staff of engineering colleges, the “Joint – Discussion” was titled, “Engineering Solutions With Artificial Intelligence Using A System Popularized As Artificial Neural Networks“.

Generally, we discuss Artificial Neural Networks either in theoretical perspective or in terms of purely scientific applications. However, the world of practical engineering is always different from theoretical or purely scientific perspective. The same applies to applications of ANN in perspective of modern digital engineering.

In this joint discussion, we spent first two days trying to understand the concept of artificial neural networks. To understand it practically, demonstrations were provided using the examples developed in JRuby. The code written for this purpose is now available on GitHub (The link is provided at the end of this post).

For next two days, all the participants were allowed to experiment with the JRuby code. Participants could play around with different training sets while modifying variables like learning rate, momentum, activation functions, number of hidden layers, number of neurons in hidden layers etc. They could also experiment with performing the same training using backpropagation algorithm and genetic algorithm. This helped them in understanding the challenges faced by engineers in practically implementing the solutions using ANN.

On the last day (Friday 19th, November 2010), we concluded the joint discussion by determining the capabilities and limitations of ANN based on the experience and knowledge obtained by participants in four days. At the end, a demo of OCR written in Javascript was given by Tejas Vernekar.

During the joint discussion, some of the alternative non-neural solutions for few problems were discussed as well. A ruby equivalent of spell checker (which uses statistical language processing) originally developed in python was also demonstrated. The ruby equivalent code is available in the code in GitHub Repository.

In case you are interested in JRuby code used during the joint discussion, you can download it from this GitHub repository.

Eventually, I thought of writing my own programming language. While I was in engineering college as a student, we had a subject on language translators. This subject taught us lot of theory on how languages are compiled or interpreted. However, we never got a chance to write even a simple programming language during our practicals. According to few, it was not possible to write one in one semester’s time.

That turned out to be my main motivation. I decided to write this programming language without using any compiler tools like LEX and YACC. I ended up writing my own lexical analyzer, the grammar parser and the language using the concepts taught to us in engineering college only. I worked on it daily for around an hour and within two weeks, I had the basic language ready.

Today, the code is released under GPL license. It’s available on GitHub at http://github.com/kamatanay/MayaLanguage

I hope it would be useful for students learning language translators.

Why did I name it Maya? Well, that’s the name of my sweetheart wife. Isn’t that a sweet name?

For those who don’t know, Deepika Padukone is a bollywood actress. The article I was reading was related to removing a software (Symantec Antivirus) which was not related to film industry or actors in any context.

I found this quite funny and thought of sharing it. Do you find it interesting as well? Let me know your thoughts through comments.

Enjoy!!!

1. Include ActionController::UrlWriter in your class
2. Call the method directly on ActionController::UrlWriter

When I tried it out, only the first method worked. I was able to use methods generated from named routes in console after including ActionController::UrlWriter. However, it was not possible to call those methods on ActionController::UrlWriter. This looks like an issue with documentation to me.

It might be the case that the second method used to work in earlier version of rails. As rails is constantly being developed, some refactoring might have made the second method obsolete. I hope rails community will fix such issues in documentation soon.

method_returning_true?.should be_true

or

method_returning_false?should be_false

This is because, ‘be_true’ and ‘be_false’ matchers considers ‘nil’ to be false and anything other than ‘nil’ to be true. When we write methods in ruby which end with question mark (‘?’), intent is that the method will return boolean value. To ensure that our tests will always reflect the intent of code, use following to assert boolean values instead of using ‘be_true’ or ‘be_false’ matchers:

method_returning_true?.should == true

or

method_returning_false?.should == false

People innovate and develop solutions or machines to reduce human efforts. In other words, machines or solutions are developed to simply our day-to-day activities. By developing complex systems, most of us don’t realize that:

• Instead of simplifying something, we have actually transferred the problem to another new system: Complex solutions give us an impression that it solves the problem completely. But in reality, it might end up creating new problems for you. This new problem could be in the form of maintenance or in the form of some hidden cost.
• Complex solutions are often too costly: This means that only few rich people will be able to use the solution.

I am sure that most of us would have heard about interactive whiteboards (also known as smart boards). These boards are quite costly as they would cost you at least few hundred thousand rupees. Due to this high cost, lot of schools and colleges cannot enjoy the benefits of such iterative systems. Now, is there a cheaper and simpler solution to this problem?

Of course there is!!! Johnny Chung Lee, who works as a researcher at Microsoft – Applied sciences, has developed a simple systems that achieves most of the functionality provided by commercial smart boards at fraction of their cost. His project makes use of an IR pen, Nintendo Wii remote and a small software application. You can watch the following video to know how this system works:

Next time, before developing any solutions or systems, try to ask yourself a question: “Is this the only way of doing this? Can there be simple way to do it?”

I am sure you will definitely find an answer

While I found the concept to be interesting, I was wondering what could be the use of looking at screenshots of pages in search result. What matters to me is getting a list of relevant search results. A thumbnail of a particular page in search result won’t help me in determining how relevant that page is to my search.

However, I do see one use for getting search results along with thumbnails. It can be used to come up with ideas for designing web-sites for a particular theme. You can search on Veesual using a keyword that describes the theme of your site and then take a quick look at the design of pages in the result. This can help you to come up with your own web-page design.

Do let me know if you can think of some more applications of Veesual.com

	public class Person
	{
		private string name;
		private int age;

		public string Name{
			get {return name;}
			set { name = value; }
		}

		public int Age{
			get {return age;}
			set { age = value; }
		}
	}

If I want to set the value of Name and Age property on the instance of Person class, I’ll need to refer to that instance for every property I need to set in the code. For example:

var person = new Person();
person.Name = "Super Man";
person.Age = 30;

It would have been great if C# had an equivalent of VB’s “With..End” statement, where we could refer to the instance of Person class only once and then refer to properties only.

Today, I came across this post “mucking about with hashes…“, which shows how C# lambdas could be used as hashes. Using this concept, I implemented a simple extension method that simulates the behavior of VB’s “With..End” statement to some extent.

Here is the code for extension method:

	public static class MetaExtensions
	{
		public static void Set(this object obj,params Func<string,object>[] hash){
				foreach(Func<string,object> member in hash){
					var propertyName = member.Method.GetParameters()[0].Name;
					var propertyValue = member(string.Empty);
					obj.GetType()
						.GetProperty(propertyName)
							.SetValue(obj,propertyValue,null);
				};
		}
	}

Using this extension method, we can set the value of properties on instance of Person class as follows:

var person = new Person();
person.Set(
	Name => "Super Man",
	Age => 30
);

Isn’t that cool?

To fix it, I had to edit ‘footer.php’ of Blass2 theme using inbuilt theme editor of WordPress (Appearance > Editor). The original ‘footer.php’ looked like this:

<div id="footer">

 <p>&copy; <?php echo date("Y")?> <!-- Please leave this line intact --><?php if (is_home()) : ?><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> | Theme <a href="http://1000ff.de/wordpress-theme-blass-english-version/">Blass</a> by <a href="http://1000ff.de/">1000ff</a><?php else : ?>Theme Blass by 1000ff<?php endif; ?> | Powered by <a href="http://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a></p>

</div>

To fix the plugin, you need to add a call to ‘wp_footer’ function in ‘footer.php’.

<div id="footer">

 <p>&copy; <?php echo date("Y")?> <!-- Please leave this line intact --><?php if (is_home()) : ?><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> | Theme <a href="http://1000ff.de/wordpress-theme-blass-english-version/">Blass</a> by <a href="http://1000ff.de/">1000ff</a><?php else : ?>Theme Blass by 1000ff<?php endif; ?> | Powered by <a href="http://wordpress.org/">WordPress</a></p>
<?php wp_footer() ?>
</div>

After making this change, syntaxhighlighter plugin started working again.

• Paste it in your chat: I know most of us do this when we quickly want to share the code. However, its annoying as it becomes unreadable and makes your code look as if its obfuscated

• Email: This approach is better compared to previous approach, however the recipient wil need to manually compile the code and run it if he wants to know the output.

I won’t say these approaches are useless. But I would like to have a place, where I can put my code fragment and then share it using a link. I can use this link in my gtalk status, chat or even in twitter posts.

Luckily, there is a site called “codepad” that allows us to do exactly the same thing. It allows us to share a piece of code using a small url.

You can try it now at “http://codepad.org/” or take a look at this example code posted by me at “http://codepad.org/XZpSNngW”

Finally, one thing I would like to see is support for C# code.