Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM) with Expectation Maximization (EM) is horribly described on 99% of the available material on the internet. Even textbooks make little to no sense (who is the expected audience of these books?) due to the lack of concrete examples and explanations of the theory. Out of the tons of pages, papers, and... Read More

This tutorial combines a few key ideas to getting started with a Hello World program using the Java Native Interface (JNI) on Mac OSX. JNI allows Java code to utilize C++ code (i.e., native code). This technology is very important if you want to do any computationally intensive operations (games, video processing, audio processing, etc)... Read More

The catch with using the Rails 3 Asset Pipeline is that all scripts (javascripts and coffeescripts) in app/assets/javascripts are compiled, merged, and minified into a single file: application.js. But, what if you don’t want a particular script dynamically (lazily) loaded only when necessary? Where do you store it? How do you reference it? Where do... Read More

“I sat in my grandfather’s chair and heard his voice.” I sat before the sea in my grandfather’s chair and felt the knowledgeable breeze; and heard his voice. He spoke gently – each word embraced like waves to the shore – of catfish and men: Unwanted bottom-feeders thrown back in disgust; having spent all their... Read More

The stone cold faces plague the car; a ride with corpses; emotionless. The children smile, jovially; they, too young to become jaded to the daily commute; the encounter with the dead. The laughter, the enjoyment of swinging around filthy steel; if only for a second, could this sight penetrate the angered shell that encases the... Read More

Gangs talking about retaliation. Gangsters and the next big job. Families and the next big funeral. Widowed wives and their crack-babies – teaching hatred for colors: of skin and garments – talking about retaliation. Read More

As I force them away, daddy don’t leave, they say. Two million of them. [embedded content] Read More

Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) is a popular investing technique whereby you incrementally purchase more shares of the funds in your portfolio: in small amounts on a monthly or quarterly basis. The main idea is to not invest all of your money at once: avoiding big dips in the market right after your purchase. If you only invest a little... Read More

When I started architecting the initial JS apps for YouNow, I sought to build structures that could be used both by our Backbone.js applications and one-off scripts/projects. These structures grew quite quickly over time; they became monolithic. In this article, I’ll examine the motivations, pros, and cons of a backend api service layer and suggest/brainstorm... Read More

Children: talking about children, talking about condoms, and cunnilingus. Children: strongly opinionated with no strong opinions. Read More