Code In Chinese

Upcoming Stanford Courses

gongchengshi — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 06:59:57 +0000

Stanford is offering a number of free online courses this semester. Two that I am interested in are Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing. If the course load is too much I will stick with NLP. I think they even give a certificate of completion.

Searching your Amazon.com Wish List

gongchengshi — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:52:27 +0000

I use my Amazon.com wish list a lot. I have hundreds of items in it. I wanted to see if I had any books in my wish list on LaTeX or TeX. So I thought this would be a good use of the Amazon.com API. Unfortunately I found out that they recently removed wish list querying methods from their API. Bummer. Then I came upon this post. http://bililite.nfshost.com/blog/2010/10/31/hacking-my-way-to-an-amazon-wishlist-widget/ . The solution is the layout=compact URL parameter.

First open one of your wish lists on Amazon.com. Add ?layout=compact to the end of the URL in the address bar. This will put all of the wish list items in a single page. Then use the browser’s search feature (ctlr+f) to search the page. If you want to search multiple wish lists, you need to click on each of them and repeat but it sure beats paging through the items.

This is a hidden feature since as far as I can tell there is no way to change the layout through the UI.

Searching the File System for Text in Images

gongchengshi — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:58:56 +0000

I did a little research and wasn’t able to find a solution. I played around with tesseract-ocr using VietOCR. It wasn’t great but it is better than nothing. Apparently tesseract is the best library out there for this and I think it is what google uses. I may be able to use tesseract-ocr for my implementation. Check out my StackOverflow question here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9007370/searching-the-file-system-for-text-in-an-image

WordPress iPad App

gongchengshi — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:50:45 +0000

I love this WordPress iPad app!

Starting to learn LaTeX… again

gongchengshi — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:21:26 +0000

I took another stab at LaTeX today. I used it once before to programmatically make Chinese character writing practice sheets. I like how it gives so much more control than a word processor does. As a test project I am redoing my resume using it. I started by downloading MiKTeX; a windows version of LaTeX. I then installed the recently updated WinEdt. So far no roadblocks to speak of. I’ll keep the blog updated on my progress and experience.

Amazon Web Services

gongchengshi — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 06:03:38 +0000

Today I set up my AWS (Amazon Web Services) account. AWS is Amazon.com’s cloud. It is a pay as you go service, meaning they charge you for GB of storage and memory and bandwidth used. In order to get an account you have to put in your credit card info, but they don’t start charging you until you cross a certain threshold or want additional services. What you get without paying is plenty enough to start experimenting. Which I intend to. Amazon has done a great job of selling through teaching. I also some time to watch a few videos on the AWS YouTube channel.

You can check out AWS at aws.amazon.com

Aku Wuwu

gongchengshi — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 02:43:06 +0000

Yesterday I had the pleasure of hanging out with the rather famous Yi poet: Aku Wuwu. He is the only Yi poet that writes in his native Nuosu dialect. He is from Xiao Liangshan in Sichuan and teaches at the Southwest University for Nationalities in Chengdu. I, along with some other students and professors, had lunch with him Mark Bender from Ohio State University. Mark one of the leading scholars in the US on the Yi people, especially with regard to their literature and performances. He is the sole translator of Aku’s works into English.

Aku is a very venerable man. He has a steady job at the university so he is able to dedicate the rest of his life to preserving his culture. One remarkable thing he told me is that there is only one publisher in the world that is able to publish in Yi script. It is located in Chengdu. They are the only ones who are set up for the type setting. There are no Yi web sites and beyond what this publisher has done there is very little published in Yi at all.

I’ve thought it would be very interesting to create an Yi character encoding and some fonts to make it possible for the language to be used in other formats such as online. It would be a very good way to learn about character encoding, typesets, and fonts. And it would add a huge boost to the proliferation of Yi literature and language.

Yesterday evening I attended a recitation of his Poetry and I stayed after for over an hour talking with Aku and Mark. It was a very enlightening experience.

You can check out Aku’s blog here: http://akuwuwu.blog.sohu.com/

New Job

gongchengshi — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 04:09:21 +0000

So last thursday, after a gruelling 4 hour interview, I was hired by Schwietzer Engineering Laboritories. I gave notice to Decagon last friday and it looks like I will be starting at SEL on May 11th. I am working in a group called Distributed Coherent Systems. This group is developing some of the most cutting edge technology in power generation and transmission control. I am pretty excited to be working there. I worked as an intern there a couple of years ago. As an intern I worked on some of the same technology that we will be implementing. At that point it was still in its exporatory research stage. Now SEL is creating viable products out of it. It is pretty cool stuff. Unfortunately, I can’t say much about it here besides what has been made public up to this point. I’ll post developments in the future as they are made public though.

Who’s got time for computer games?

gongchengshi — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 02:21:50 +0000

I often hear about grown men with professions that seem to spend a substantial amount of their personal time playing computer games. Here is what I would like to know: Who are these people?!?!

I worked out my schedule for the next few years of my life and here it is:

Monday through Friday:
6:00 AM – Wake up
7:00 AM – Get to work
Sometime between 7:00 AM and 6:00 PM – Go to class
6:00 PM – Go home and eat dinner
7:00 PM – 9:00 PM Do daily chores (Yard work, outside projects, inside projects, homework, …)
9:00 PM – Put the kids to bed and spend some quiet time with my wife
10:00 PM – Go to bed and hope to get at least 7 hrs of sleep
6:00 AM – Wake up and do it all over again

Saturday and Sunday
Spend some time with the family
Work my butt off getting personal projects done

Does it look like there is time in there to spend thousands of hours figuring out how to level up and defeat Zoltran or become a community activist in my Sims community?

I sure hope I’m a round worlder

gongchengshi — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:34:25 +0000

I found this excellent quote on Jon Hancock’s blog

“You can pretend the world is flat all you want. Those that understand it is not will pick up where you have left off.”

Thanks for the great quote Jon.