traviscj/blog

I’m planning on “civilizing” my KLR650 just a tiny bit, since it is coming up on 1500 miles and I haven’t made it offroad at all yet.

One idea i have been mulling over lately is exposing a java codebase relationally, with queries like: SELECT * FROM classes c JOIN annotations a ON a.class_id = c.id WHERE a.name = 'MyAnnotationClass'; The idea here is that you could search a codebase by

I’ve been experimenting a lot with some kinda “toy” data models based on random things that I wish there was a database to query, but isn’t.

I often create a directory/file called _useful/_useful.org/_useful.txt.

I came across Better output from sqlite3 command line.

I took a quick pass at describing the rules of a card game I grew up playing, Sprat: Each player(or team) has 1 deck of cards. initial setup is 4 cards face up (the “personal piles”), 13 cards (top card face up, others face down) in the “sprat deck”, and…

I love ledger-cli but keeping it in sync with my bank statements drives me crazy.

I’ve been playing around a tiny bit with clojure, and wanted to document the process of doing something pretty basic: make a project that can request my website over HTTPs.

I had stupidly written a pair of functions like this: def comma_sep(amount): thousands = int(amount/1000) remainder = int(amount%1000) if thousands > 0: return comma_sep(thousands)+","+"%.3d"%(remainder) else: return str(re…

Consider a silly data model to store data about cities like message City { optional string city_name = 1; optional string state = 2; optional int32 population = 3; optional int32 year_founded = 4; // ... presumably others :-) } and some sample…

Ingredients: 1/4 cup brown sugar, packed 1/4 cup reduced sodium soy sauce 2 tsp sesame oil 1/2 tsp crushed red-pepper flakes 1/4 tsp ground ginger 1 tbsp vegetable oil 3 cloves garlic, minced 1 pound ground beef 2 green onions, thinly sliced. 1/4 tsp sesa…

I did a 725-mile drive yesterday from Prosser, WA to San Francisco, CA.

I recently came across McCarthy’s CBCL paper on Hacker News.

Ever since I found out about it (probably on Hacker News), the idea of Oblique Strategies has fascinated me.

Two new learnings at the 250mi point: The backpack straps down to the back!

Last week I was telling Paul about things I have brew installed on my work laptop.

Yesterday I finally got the title for my motorcycle and realized that I’d owned it for exactly one month!

One of my friends at work asked me if I had any book recommendations for learning about stocks and options.

Hacker News et al are obsessed with streaks, but I think they have some problems: A single regression resets to zero.

Specifically, the Philippine Brand Dried Mangoes.

One of the things I’ve been meaning to do forever is switch things over to https.

I’ve been really inspired by the MagicMirror project.

Today I made some individually sealed ibuprofen (Advil) and cetirizine (Zyrtec) packets: !

I’ve been wanting to get into canning for a while.

Lots of folks wax poetic about their every day carry kit, and then include things like fishing hooks.

I’ve been working on a few fun projects recently.

A while back, I realized that I wanted a nice digital SLR camera.

This might seem silly, but I’ve beeing playing with some json.sh scripts that build legitimate json bodies and are easily filled into a shell script variable as needed.

As much as I enjoy driving, radio almost always annoys me.

I finally sent the last check for my 2013 Ford Focus a couple of weeks ago, and finally got the title in the mail today.

Suppose you want to evaluate the multiplication problem $C = A\cdot B$.

My standard plan for debugging internet connections: Can we reach stuff from some other device?

A while ago, I wrote down a list of clever life rules in my day-to-day notebook.

In grad school, I spent a lot of time writing code that read output from nonlinear optimization solvers, and tried to do useful things with it.

I spent a few hours this evening switching everything over from tcjblog to Jekyll.

Sometimes, it is tempting to see 14.99 and say “about 14,” even though we all know better.

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During my Ph.D.

I found a really cool tool called mnemonicode.

I recently discovered something pretty cool: groovy, and in particular groovysh.

Like many others, I have been hit by the heartbleed bug, which kinda sucks.

My fiancée and I both spend a fair bit of time working from home, so we notice downtime almost immediately.

I have learned a lot of programming languages over the course of my life.

I probably should have been working on my thesis, but I had a phone interview with Square.

zsh Zsh is an amazing (mostly) drop-in replacement for bash.

I have finally released the overly-ambitious-isqo project on github!

I wanted to have a quick example of what iterative refinement is and looks like.

I had an embarrassing realization: While C does have an address-of operator, it does not include reference variable or pass-by-reference syntax.

I’ve been working on C implementations of my research projects, which can of course be a perilous project.

I’m working on a paper about an algorithm for hotstarting nonlinear program solves; one application of this might be in the realm of nonlinear model predictive control.