Volkswagen made headlines lately for cheating U.S. EPA regulators. But let's pay some respect to their engineers.Apparently, there is no button or switch that tells car it's being tested - indeed - that would be obvious flaw in the emission test protoc... [Read more...]

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When building visualizations with ggplot2 in R I decided to create specialized functions that encapsulate plotting logic for some of my creations. In this case instead of commonly used aes function I had to use its alternative -  aes_string - for aesthetic mapping from a string.And now goes ... [Read more...]

I began using Octave for homework assignments from the online Machine Learning class. Having worked with languages like Python, Groovy and JavaScript I never expected a system designed for numerical computations to include such a complete and unique programming language. But it does and I can't resist sharing some examples.... [Read more...]

Part 2: Autocomplete with YUI3 and GAE RPC HandlersThis is second and final part of 2-part series on implementing AutoComplete with GAE. Recall that in part 1 we built a foundation for keyword autocomplete lookup service for our document search application. Both the service itself and its HTML/JavaScript client will materialize ... [Read more...]

Part 1: Embedded Relation Index EntityI continue series of posts about keyword-based searches on Google App Engine (GAE) using Relation Index Entity (see RIE with Java and REI with Python posts in this order). Having implemented efficient search on GAE let's switch the focus to usability. When user searches for a ... [Read more...]

Scripting with Groovy is exciting thing. You get a feeling that the language was inspired by an Oracle who read your mind and then made it 10 times better. So imagine how I felt after finding out that Groovy can NOT batch prepared statements.Batching sql updates, inserts or deletes is ... [Read more...]

My love for template method pattern hit the wall. The wall of Java constructors that is. Do not mix them together ever or at least without double checking. Again, I am all for template method pattern when it operates on fully initialized objects. But, ... [Read more...]