August 2008 – Page 2 – Wisdom And Wonder

Data-Driven Enhancement of Facial Attractiveness

Here is an article about training a system about what makes a person look more pretty such that given a picture, the system can make the person in it “prettier”.
(I forgot where I saw this)

Proceedings of the 2008 LLVM Developers' Meeting

Here is a post at LtU about the proceedings of the 2008 LLVM Developers’ Meeting

MPSCM: A Distributed Extension to MzScheme

MPSCM is an extension to the MzScheme dialect of Scheme that provides facil-ities for distributed programming with a message passing base and higher-level distributing constructs designed in a more functional style. This paper provides a description of the MPSCM environment and an analysis of the results in terms of performance, expressivity, and usability.

Shelves in Subversion

This blog post looks like it might be a good introduction to the idea of “Code Shelves” and how one might use them in Subversion.

Elk Scheme

Elk [Scheme] is an implementation of the Scheme programming language. In contrast to existing, stand-alone Scheme systems Elk has been designed specifically as an embeddable, reusable extension language subsystem for applications written in C or C++.

Buddhabrot

Buddhabrot is an alternate rendering of the Mandelbrot set. Have a look here.

A System to Understand Incorrect Programs

An ancient paper (July 1978: 30 years ago) from the long gone Lisp Bulletin by Harald Wertz.
The system describes attempts to improve incompletely specified Lisp programs, without however resorting to more information, in the form of specifications, test cases or the like.

Found here.

Managing Gigabytes

Managing Gigabytes helps you to meet this challenge by showing how to capitalize on new methods of compressing and accessing data, enabling you to store information more efficiently and locate specific items more quickly and cost-effectively than ever before. It uniquely covers fully-tested techniques for both text and image compression and shows how to construct a tailor-made electronic index for accessing text, scanned documents, and images. This book largely avoids extensive theoretical and mathematical discussions, making it accessible to curious laypersons who seek a clear, uncomplicated understanding of this new technology. Real, large-scale problems are illustrated, and the technical material is sprinkled with anecdotes and background information.

(via PLT)

Netflix Prize

The Netflix Prize seeks to substantially improve the accuracy of predictions about how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences. Improve it enough and you win one (or more) prizes.

Anyone looking for programming fodder might have fun applying their current language of study to Netflix’s problem and massive data set!
(via PLT)

When I was first learning about Functional Programming and Scheme, the idea that order-of-execution didn’t matter in purely functional programs, was “strange to me”, to put it nicely. When I first read about Scheme’s begin form, for example, I remember feeling satisfied that Scheme wasn’t totally insane as it had at least some way to force imperative execution (the fact that, at the time, I never considered how such a feature may be implemented using Scheme’s core constructs, I now consider to be both a ‘missed opportunity’ and ‘study flaw’, then again you could also call it ‘learning’). Nonetheless, much, much later, while reading LAMBDA: The Ultimate Imperative, I came upon page 5 on which the question of how we may model imperative constructs in languages based on lambda calculus (like Scheme, for example) was raised.
Continue reading “Sequencing in Scheme”