Life plus Linux: November 2014

Posts

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Magic Cauldron: Harry Potter Themed Gender Reveal Party - #Aurdino
Earlier this year, we had a very fun filled Harry Potter themed gender reveal party. For the reveal, I built a Magic Cauldron which would reveal the gender. Check it out for yourself! For this I needed: A Cauldron. WS2812B LED array. Aurdino UNO. Bread board and jumper wires. Dry ice. Kasa Smart bulbs I will go over in the following sections The Mist.
Kakashi: The Copycat Robot - #Aurdino #image processing
In this post, I want to share about "Kakashi: The Copycat Robot"—a fun side project I built a few years ago. The name is inspired by the famous character from Naruto, Kakashi Hatake, also known as the Copycat Ninja.The goal of this robot was to mimic Kakashi's ability to copy movements—though, of course, in a more limited way. Check it out for yourself!Here are the things I used to build this:
Neural network inference pipeline for videos in Tensorflow - #Deeplearning #Tensorflow
Just as we saw a huge influx of images in the past decade or so, we are now seeing a lot of videos being produced on social media. The need to understand and moderate videos using machine learning has never been greater. In this post, I will show you how to build an efficient pipeline to processes videos in Tensorflow.  For simplicity, let us consider a Resnet50 model pre-trained on
Finding Where's Waldo using Mask R-CNN - #Deeplearning #ML
When I was a kid, I really loved solving Where's Waldo. There were few books (it used to be called Where's Wally) in our school library on which I spent hours finding Waldo. For people who do not know what it is, basically Waldo - a unique character is hidden among hundreds of other characters and you have to find him in all the chaos in the image. Now that I am too old to be solving it and
Higher level ops for building neural network layers with deeplearn.js - #Deeplearning #javascript #ML
I have been meddling with google's deeplearn.js lately for fun. It is surprisingly good given how new the project is and it seems to have a sold roadmap. However it still lacks something like tf.layers and tf.contrib.layers which have many higher level functions that has made using tensorflow so easy. It looks like they will be added to Graphlayers in future but their priorities as of now is to

Monday, 24 November 2014

Type checking in javascript has never been easier

I love languages which aren't strongly typed. It makes software development process very fast and very easy as we need not write huge, complex, unreadable code like in our typed languages. However this can lead to developer's worst nightmare: Runtime errors! In languages such as javascript it is not easy to check for type mismatches while in development process. Hence flow was invented!

Flow is one of Facebook's open source projects. It allows developers to check for programming errors in javascript code with very less effort. This is a sample code available on their site:

function foo(x) {
  return x * 10;
}
foo('Hello, world!');

Note that a string is passed into the function foo and an arithmetic operation is performed on that string inside it. When flow is run on this code:

01_HelloWorld/hello.js:7:5,17: string
This type is incompatible with
  01_HelloWorld/hello.js:4:10,13: number

It points out that the string is incompatible with number. Consider a much much complex code. An error like this can simply be unnoticed until a runtime error is raised.

Source: https://github.com/facebook/flow
Installation: http://flowtype.org/docs/getting-started.html
Examples: http://flowtype.org/docs/five-simple-examples.html

Sunday, 23 November 2014

Navigation Bar suddenly disappeared on Nexus

This can happen on any phone with soft navigation keys.

Yesterday, I was tweaking my Nexus 4 after updating to Lollipop. When I restarted my phone I found that the Navigation Bar had disappeared! Even to switch from one app to another I had to restart my phone! Then I found a way to fix it.

Install Root explorer or ES Explorer. Open it and go to /system and mount it in R/W.

Then open the file build.prop in the current folder using text editor.

Then go to bottom of the file and change the value of "qemu.hw.mainkeys" from 1 to 0

Reboot and you are done!