M635 J520

Since the deadline for wishing people a Happy New Year here in France is not before 24h00 the 31st of January, I figured I would take the opportunity to try to jot down some musings on some of the new board games I have encountered last year before the month is up… I’ll kick off with the seven that I enjoyed the most. The Start of a Dominant Species Game... Or Candy Evolution Saga? (If the franchise was in other hands...) Darwin on Ice The very first new board game I tried in 2013 (according to my rather flaky board game geek-logging - and a little bgg scraping script ) was the fabulous Dominant Species . Pros: Excellent theme(!), and relatively fast paced gameplay. Cons: A potential flaw is that maybe a bit too many points are scored at the very end of the game - something that can potentially lead to Analysis Paralysis when it is nigh… Still early in Love Letter. But someone knows already something about someone. Velvet Bluffing One of many Japanese game-discoveries...

The other day I noticed/remembered that I had an instagram account. And, according to my sister, I was quite active on it. Apparently. I kept following new persons. That suprised me, so I logged on and investigated. “I” followed 974 (or so) persons I had never heard of… My first instinct was to delete the account.* But that would have been too easy, so I decided to investigate the Instagram-API to see if that could help me “get rid” (most) of the people I followed. And lo and behold I found this page  - very promising, so I registered an app to get access to this. Since Instagram uses OAuth that landed me a client ID and a client secret. Not awfully familiar with the innards of OAuth, I realized that for anything to work I would need an access token. Since this script was just for personal use, I figured I could just generate this once(ish) and use that to get access to my account. I followed the instructions on this (page):  http://dmolsen.com/2013/04/05/generating-access-...

Marché de La Rochelle HDR  Probably about two years ago - when taking Andrew Ng's excellent "Machine Learning" MOOC, Johannes sent me a piece of JavaScript that populated the video lists with overall time per lesson just by pasting it into the URL-thingy in Chrome. Magic. Today when I sat down to start the course on "General Game Playing" that I have signed up for, but, alas, not (yet) found much time for, I thought of that piece of code and wondered if I, with my new knowledge of JavaScript, could whip up something like that. (Also I couldn't find Johannes' original one.) I quickly hacked together something this afternoon over a flat white in a hipster cafe here in Lyon. And lo and behold it worked. Then I extended the functionality to also show minutes and seconds of unwatched video - as well as total overall counters for the entire course. Now each lesson heading reads "Lesson N - Name [time remaining/total time]" instead of just ...

A couple of years ago my (most of the time excellent) Maranz SR6004 acted up. It did't want to turn itself on. Properly. Just stood there and blinked rapidly. Its little red light that is. At me. The solution was so simple that I didn't bother to write it down as I was sure to remember it. Alas, no. Some weeks ago it did it again. (Can it be the heat?) Just stood there blinking rapidly at me. The manual just said - as it said last time around - that it was time to return the unit to it's maker. Or similar. Some googling led me to this page:  http://www.allquests.com/question/4056803/Marantz-XXX4-Series-Failure-Issues.html  The technical term for what I had experienced seems to be "The Pop of Death". Aïe. But!, humongous letters said: YOU CAN SOMETIMES RESET THE UNIT BY PRESSING SURR MODE, CLEAR AND EXIT SIMULTANEOUSLY And so I did. And so it was fixed. And all was well. (And now I have written it down for the next time.)

One of my most popular posts on this blog is the one about my quick D3 map projections morphing hack . Today I discovered that Mike Bostock , the creator of D3 himself, has made a similar visualization now - only way nicer. Available here:  http://bl.ocks.org/mbostock/3711652  Enjoy!

Next week this little blog experiment will turn 6 months, and yesterday it passed 10000 views (sans counting my own revisits - in theory), so I guess some of the things I put up here are useful to others as well (or Google's counting is different than how others might do this)... Anyways: thanks. Update 27/09/2013 : 2 posts (and six months) later and the count has passed 20000...

Inspired by the partitioning problem I set about to implement a well known algorithm, k-means clustering, from memory, for fun! ... and, for science... Interestingly, this is somehow the opposite of the partitioning problem. In the partitioning problem we tried to maximize variation of categorical variables within groups, whereas here we're trying to find groups of elements that are the most "similar" to each other in a n-dimensional continuous space. The main idea of k-means is the following - if you have a bunch of elements and a given number of clusters: Create the initial clusters randomly within the space spanned by the elements (typically (always?) you would pick randomly from your elements). Lob all elements into the cluster with the nearest center (using some Euclidean distance metric typically). Recenter each cluster on the average of its elements,  If necessary move the elements to their now nearest clusters.  Repeat the "re-centering" and mov...