Useful Info

For now, this is a mix of stuff. As it grows I will probably reorganize it, so be forewarned about bookmarking particular pages.

Jim Hendler's funding tutorial slides.

How to do Research at the MIT AI Lab. I got this from here.

How to Be a Good Graduate Student

I used to enjoy hacking Lisp using SLIME and SBCL.

I used Python for a couple of years, but I swtiched to Ruby for the things I wanted to use Python for. Ruby is a much more cleanly-designed language and Rails became popular with commodity web hosts before its flattering Python copycat, Django, coud even reach a 1.0 release.

These days my hacking toolkit consists of Ruby (and Rails) and Scala. I'm certain that Scala will be the next big language.

I've been looking into lightweight text formats (and associated Emacs modes). So far, I like reStructred Text (reST), which is part of doctils.

I used Markdown and Pandoc to generate slides for my oral qualifier. Some benefits:

• Your source is a text file with readable lightweight markup.
• With Pandoc (and other tools) you can translate this source text into a variety of formats, including PDF.
• You can embed LaTeX math directly into your text, and Pandoc will insert the resulting formula into your output document.
• Pandoc will generate S5 formatted HTML slides. The sooner PowerPoint dies, the better the world will be.

I wrote a short primer on Principle Components Analysis (PCA) (PDF, reST) for my CS 7641 Machine Learning study group. (Please inform me of any errors. I am not a mathematician.)

Unix Command Line Tips