Strava + OpenStreetMap

Strava's 'slide' plugin and GPS heatmap is pretty neat. I've been using it to find roads or walking paths in forest areas with good success.

If you aren't sure what I'm talking about, there's a really neat talk about detecting paths based on averaged GPS traces, which no doubt could generally apply to a lot of drawing or tracing that humans have to undertake.

PEAR and Math

Do you love your math packages?

PEAR is looking for new maintainers for:

Math_BinaryUtils
Math_Complex
Math_Fibonacci
Math_Finance
Math_Histogram
Math_Integer
Math_Matrix
Math_Polynomial
Math_Quaternion
Math_Stats
Math_TrigOp
Math_Vector

Each is on our short list to cull, as the current maintainers have vanished. At the moment, they won't be included installable by our next version of PEAR, nicknamed pyrus.

Migrating them is pretty trivial, but if no one uses them or wants to look after them, we might end up leaving them as is.

Interested? Let us know.

The Mathmatics of Office Pizza

Step One:
Decide who's going to eat pizza, and how much they could eat.

Step Two:
Determine sizes:

diameter = 2r
PI = 3.14
area_of_pizza = PIr^2

Diameter	Area (square inches)
9	63.585
12	113.04
15	176.625
18	254.34

People:

person_consumption = quantity * PIr2

Person	QTY	Size	Square Inches
James	1	12	113.04
Kevin	1.25	12	141.3
Laurie	0.75	12	84.78
Yuxin	0.75	12	84.78
Dan	1	12	113.04
Vandana	0.5	12	56.52
Vishal	1	9	63.585
Nick	0.5	12	56.52
Robby	0.75	12	84.78
Jo	0.75	12	84.78
Sven	0.75	12	84.78

Total Consumption = 883.125, Average: 80.2


Question:
Do we get either:
3 * 18 inch + 1 * 15 inch
3 * 18 inch + 12 inch

And which one do we make (an 18 or 15 inch) a vegetarian (Vandana/Vishal require this)?



Proposed Solution:
* Feed Vandana + Vishal first and foremost of a 15 inch family pizza
* Everyone else fights tooth and nail for the remained

3 Party 763.02
1 Family 176.625
Total: 939.645


3 Party 763.02
1 Large 113.04
Total: 876.06


result = 3*18 inch + 15 inch pizza; // 939.645
leftovers = result - total_consumption; // 939.645 - 883.125 = ~56 square inches of leftover pizza.


Assuming crust and extra hungryness, we should be bang on target!

Results after lunch

Bookshelf

I've been in a very bookish mood of late. I've churned through countless books over christmas. My room is covered in piles of dusty books I love. My girlfriend has even caught the fever and is reading at a tremendous rate.

I've been fooling around in some shady things. Like clit. Ahem. Convert Lit. I've also been looking at OeB - a 'standard' for the ebook industry.

Rubbishy standard. Everyone takes an OEB and them DRMs it to SFA. (Translation: OeB isn't used as plain OeB, making me think what is the point?)

Book people just don't get metadata. Librarians kind of do. But book makers, particularly ebook makers, don't really. ISBN? Use it as a what? International identifying number for my work? Why ever should I do that! BAH!
I'll use a GUID. Globally Unique Identifier. Yes, that's it.

Luckily, Amazon provides fixes for this; title based lookup for ISBN.

To that end, I've begun some work. On a Bookshelf. It's in C#, my first decent C# undertaking. There's nothing much at the moment to it, just an OEB Serializer and Unserializer class. Work enough in itself!

Browse the CVS if you care to.

On a cooler note, I found generation5.org. Generation5 is all about AI, and I found it while googling for LSystems and Virtual Plants. I was wowed at how easy it was to do much of this. The math isn't hard. Neural Nets are fairly simple to construct, and training seems the hardest part. The coolest-thing-ever was the article on ISBN reading from scanned barcodes via webcam. I'd only ever seen this mentioned before in relation to an Apple application. That is definately on the list of cool things to hack. I'm too lazy to find the link for either.

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