Brett Hutley's Blog

Back in the late 80's/early 90's, I used to argue that programmers should do their coding on an 8086 machine, an IBM XT for example, rather than something more powerful like a 286. My argument was that by using a slow machine, you had the same user experience as your average user, and you could optimize the program appropriately.

Continue reading “Big Iron”

I met up with some of my old team from BNP Paribas last week. I found it striking that everyone who was there is now working directly with Machine Learning. It was quite inspiring!

For the last few years I've been building Trading Execution Algorithms for Westpac. Time to do something different!

I decided to enroll in Coursera's Deep Learning Specialization. I've just finished the first week, and I am really enjoying it. Andrew Ng is a fantastic teacher. I did his previous course on Machine Learning and loved it.

I have both an iPad Pro and a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 tablet running Linux. Depending on what I am planning on doing on a day-to-day basis affects which device I carry around. Mostly I carry my Surface, as I have Linux installed, and it allows me to easily do development, remotely administer machines, or do general computing tasks. The keyboard on it isn't great however - it's kind of flimsy and doesn't work well if it's not on a firm surface. I can't easily use it on a train for example. It was perfect when we were in Australia for a month, and allowed me to both work and do University assignments. I can use it as a tablet for reading, but it isn't great for that.

Continue reading “iPad Pro versus MS Surface Usability”

I just bought myself a second-hand Surface Pro 3 and installed Linux on it. It runs Ubuntu extremely well, with almost everything working out of the box. It's lovely having an light-weight machine that I can use as a tablet, but also do development on.

In order to build PostgreSQL from source on my MacBook Pro running El Capitan, I first downloaded the git repo: git clone git://git.postgresql.org/git/postgresql.git I then built it: cd postgresql ./configure gmake sudo make install This will install the binaries to the default location of "/usr/local/pgsql". I already had a user called "_postgres" in my /etc/passwd file, so I configured to run PostgreSQL as this user:

Continue reading “Installing PostgreSQL from source on my Mac”

Here is a talk about machine learning given by Jeremy Howard which is part of the Exponential Finance Conference series which is well worth watching: The Data Science Revolution (Jeremy Howard) - Exponential Finance 2014 from Exponential Conference Series on Vimeo.

Last night I was trying to print a camera lens clip that allows you to clip your camera lens to your camera strap. Unfortunately the clip for the strap wasn't wide enough. Fortunately the OpenSCAD files were included, and all the settings were in the file. It was simply a matter of changing the appropriate variables in the OpenSCAD file and then exporting the model.

Continue reading “OpenSCAD rocks the house!”

Yesterday my XYZ Da Vinci 3D Printer arrived. I had a really fun day setting it up and doing some test prints. The first print I made was the "key chain" print that is on the firmware. This created a rather lame "XYZ" logo that I assume you can attach to your keyring. The CD that came with the printer only has Windows versions of the XYZ Printer software, despite proclaiming Mac versions as well. Fortunately, the software is downloadable from their website. Next, Helen created a model in XSI of an egg cup that looks like a bird's nest. She exported it to Blender and then we created an STL file which we then imported into the XYZ Printer software. The print for this took about 3 hours, and the results were less than perfect. The egg cup still looks pretty cool though. This morning I printed a 3D printed shell and ordered an Arduino so I could reset my filament cartridge as described here. So far I'm pretty happy with the printer. It was pretty cheap at £500, and I've really enjoyed playing around with it. I'm keen learn a lot more about 3D printing, and I think that this printer is a great one to start with.

I received 5 iBeacon transmitter units from ibeaconmodules.us today. They arrived unassembled, so I put them together and configured their local names with my iPhone.

The first hurdle I found in setting them up was getting the battery in the right way around. Each unit comes with a watch battery, and you need to have the side with the plus sign facing away from the circuitry.

Continue reading “Configuring a Jaalee iBeacon Transmitter”

Here is a YouTube video showing a researcher working with an Oculus Rift and Three Microsoft Kinects. Even this simple setup looks amazing!