Blog Posts

Using R with Java is painful, ugly.

While I was recently revisiting REpochX which I quickly wrote long time ago to evolve R grammars using Grammatical Evolution, I decided to do the same with MOEA Framework instead of EpochX as the latter does not look actively maintained.

Firstly, MOEA Framework is very comprehensive and the coding practice is a lot moderner compared to similar evolutionary computing libraries.

But, again, R/Java bindings... That's killing me.

Planning my schedule and highlighting important deadlines using a software proved to be less effective for me compared to using pen and paper. I started a short time ago to print a month calendar which is very handy for this task.

If you want to print your own calendar in a nice format as a postscript file, you can try the following on your terminal with pcal:

brew install pcal ## Or "sudo apt-get install pcal" on Ubuntu/Debian
pcal -w -P a4 -F 1 -t Garamond -d Garamond > calendar.ps
ps2pdf calendar.ps ## To convert it into PDF format if you need

Now you have a nicely formatted yearly calendar.

Every programmer's dream: Solve a problem which sucks, turn it into a business, make some money. Bogdan did it. Nicely...

You want to see the MongoDB, CouchDB and Redis Java APIs in action? In the same editor window? Take a glance at this...

Securing a web application can be easier than you think. Keycloak is a convenient and powerful alternative to implementing your own security mechanism by providing an SSO and IDM implementation.

What is the ultimate experience of managing and reading e-books across various devices we use? This article is a summary of my quest in this direction.

Here is a quick diagram of how cardinality (or Multiplicity as it is called in UML) idea is used in data modeling. Please ignore the real-life rarities and exceptions of the example used.

I recently compiled a list of online courses which seem relevant to my ongoing PhD studies and thought that it would be good to put it online. Some of them are too much introductory, but just in case...

We are using Atlassian JIRA On Demand. It is very slow and becomes very annoying when trying to organize multiple projects. For now, I decided to use a command line application, jira-cli to quickly check my issues on JIRA. Here is how I utilize it using my bash configuration.

Red5 is a media streaming server which is implemented using Java and bundled in a Tomcat application container. Decoupling it from Tomcat is a bit troublesome. If you want to add a bit of HTTP REST flavour to your application without the hassle of decoupling it from Tomcat, you can use RESTEasy. Here is how I did it.

"How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method" by George Pólya provides a detailed and entertaining survey of general methods for problem solving, namely Heuristics. I guess that most people dealing with mathematics in daily life have read this book.

I find first pages of a book as the most instructive ones for many reasons. When I look into a good book which I've read many years ago, I still find those first pages more interesting and inspiring.

It is a useful practice to customize the initialization of R. This is achieved through RPROFILE (system wide) and RPROFILE_USER (user specific) files which are both simple R scripts.

The human-kind has been performing accounting for more than 7,000 years. This discipline does not only give us the arithmetic means to plan, execute and assess business transactions, but also the universal language of business.

In particular, we have been using the double-entry bookkeeping system for about the last 5 centuries as a framework to record transactions. Furthermore, with the help of the concept of ledgers, we have been consolidating transactions and reporting summaries of them through standardized documents such as balance sheets, income statements etc.

So far, so good... But is it all good? I have some doubts. In the following, I will briefly explain two concerns of mine. By the end, a recent ontological movement follows which really excites me.