11. Why use a genetic algorithm instead of a backpropagation algorithm to train a neural net ? 12. What is the difference between a support vector machine (SVM) and an artificial neural network (ANN) ? 13. What s a Naives Bayes classifier ? 14. What is the difference between supervised and unsurpervised learning 15. What is Continue reading Tech questions 11-16: Artificial intelligence

Hey guys, This is a new series I will try to maintain to the best of my capabilities. I have this awesome blogger who happens to be also a Microsoft MVP called Iris Classon. After her first year of programming, she started to ask and get answers for what she d call stupid question . Why would Continue reading Tech questions 1-9 : LINQ questions

Hey guys, So, professional shaped skills What s that. Basically, it s the form your skills take concerning your expertise in your individual field(s). This form will depend on both depth and broadness. Trying to learn as many things as possible will lead to little depth and a large broadness of skills. The exact opposite leads to Continue reading Shaping your profesional skills structure

Hey guys, Today s post is to make you understand that even is oriented-object programming (OOP) feels now finally natural and exquisite, they are better ways to design and implement your solutions to make them better and of course, safer. My goal today is to make you want to adopt a functional mindset when creating software Continue reading Tech questions 10-17: FP questions

Debian: I am very late on post due to travel, Flu, jetlag sorry! choqok:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=825322
For this I was able to come up with a patch for kconfig_compiler to encode generated files to utf-8.
Review request is here:
https://git.reviewboard.kde.org/r/128102/
This has been approved and I will be pushing it as soon as I patch the qt5 frameworks version.

Both kde4libs and kf5 kconfig has been pushed upstream kde. kxmlgui:

WIP this has been a steep learning curve, according to the notes it was an easy embedded kernel version, that was not the case! After grueling hours of
trying to sort out randomness in debug output I finally narrowed it down to cases where QStringLiteral was used and there were non letter characters eg. ( <") These were causing debug symbols to generate with ( lambda() ) which caused unreproducible symbol/debug files. It is now a case of fixing all of these in the code to use QString::fromUtf8 seems to fix this. I am working on a mega patch for upstream and it should be ready early in the week. This last week I spent a large portion making my through a mega patch for kxmlgui, when it was suggested to me to write a small qt app to test QStringLiteral isolated and sure enough two build were byte for byte identical. So this means that QStringLiteral may not be the issue at all. With some more assistance I am to expand my test app with several QStringLiterals of varying lengths, we have suspicion it is a padding issue, which complicates things.

I am still fighting with this one, will set aside to simmer for now, as I have no idea how to fix padding issues. extra-cmake-modules:
I am testing a patch to fix umask issues for anyone that uses the kapptemplate generation macro. Thank you Simon for pointing me to this.
known affected:
plasma-framework kdevplatform:
The kapptemplate generation users/groups and umask patch has been pushed upstream.
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=363615 KDE Randa!:
Despite managing to get a terrible Flu I accomplished more than I would have at home without awesome devs to help me out!

• I have delegated the windows backend to Hannah and Kevin, if emerge is successful with Windows we will implement it on OSX as well.
• Android docker image is up and running.
• Several snappy packages done. Improved the snapcraft.yaml creation automation scripts started by Harald. Got help from
  David ( he even made a patch! ) with some issues we were facing with kio.
• KDE CI DSL adjustments for 5 new platforms
• Port tools/* python scripts to python3

CI TODO:

• Python automation scripts can no longer find projects except qt5 Need to get help from Ben as these are originally his.
• Finish yaml CI files

Randa as usual was an amazing experience. Yes it is very hard work, but you have the beauty of the Swiss Alps at your fingertips! Not to mention all the
friendly faces and collaboration. A big thank you to all supporters and the Randa team! Please help make KDE better by supporting the very important Randa Sprint:
https://www.kde.org/fundraisers/randameetings2016/ Have a great day.

Hey guys Today, I m here talking about how to better ourselves us developers. We re always learning while working and that s bad. We should instead learn in our own time and practice before trying to use our tools to resolve the bugs in the software and the features requests from the clients. Learning on the job Continue reading Become better, learn better, do code katas !

Hey guys, In spirit of my withdraw from the Google Summer of Code program this summer, I thought I d do a piece of the project I successfully completed last summer. So what brought me to the program last year ? I spent a few weeks on working on a new thing in .NET called Roslyn. Continue reading GSOC 2015 : From NRefactory 6 to RefactoringEssentials

Hi, Today, I ll be talking about a special project I have not only designed from A to Z but also implemented. Well, it s not as big as this sentence let s it sound. I worked on developing a prototype of a mobile game in augmented reality. Being a huge fan of tactical RPGs, I found it Continue reading Augmented Tactics: A role playing game prototype

Hi guys, Well because of health problems, I won t be able to meet the expectation for the midterm evaluation coming next week and I will have to step down from the program. It pains me to do so since the project was taking me out of my comfort zone and forcing to adapt to a Continue reading GSOC 2016 : The end

Hey guys, Being myself a fan of functional programming and cross-platform development, I thought you might like a nice read on how to create your very first platformer game with F# & MonoGame. Making a platformer in F# with MonoGame For those not having any prior knowledge of F#, don t worry, I m going to do Continue reading Making a platformer in F# with MonoGame

Hi guys, Last summer, I got into an interesting course entitled Emerging topics in information technologies . During the first part of the course, we focused more on 3D computer vision techniques and how to manipulate 3D images.Issues such as depth-image-based rendering were obscure and captivating enough to get me motivated throughout the summer semester. In order Continue reading Interesting project : Render stereoscopic 3D images using Kinect 2.0

Hi guys, Late post before I go to bed. I don t know if you ever heard about Euler problems ? It s a series of challenging computer and mathematical programming problems. They require some thinking in order to be solved. The reason behind solving them is to acquire better skills at problem solving, which is something Continue reading Euler problems

Hey guys, What are extension methods ? Extension methods are quite simple to understand and they can be quite useful in time of needs. An extension method give you the power to create a new method for any type that you would like. They re static methods designed to extend the capabilities of a type without Continue reading Bring more functionalities to types using extension methods

Hey guys, I won t say yet again that it has been too long because it really was. I ll try to keep my blog updated weekly concerning a program I m doing with Google this summer. It s called the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Basically, it s meant for students to be able to contribute on an open Continue reading GSoC16: First coding week

The fifth update in the 0.12.* series of Rcpp has arrived on the CRAN network for GNU R a few hours ago, and was just pushed to Debian. This 0.12.5 release follows the 0.12.0 release from late July, the 0.12.1 release in September, the 0.12.2 release in November, the 0.12.3 release in January, and the 0.12.4 release in March --- making it the ninth release at the steady bi-montly release frequency. This release is one again more of a maintenance release addressing a number of small bugs, nuisances or documentation issues without adding any major new features. Rcpp has become the most popular way of enhancing GNU R with C or C++ code. As of today, 662 packages on CRAN depend on Rcpp for making analytical code go faster and further. That is up by almost fifty packages from the last release in late March! And as during the last few releases, we have first-time committers. we have new first-time contributors. Sergio Marques helped to enable compilation on Alpine Linux (with its smaller libc variant). Qin Wenfeng helped adapt for Windows builds under R 3.3.0 and the long-awaited new toolchain. Ben Goodrich fixed a (possibly ancient) Rcpp Modules bug he encountered when working with rstan. Other (recurrent) contributor Dan Dillon cleaned up an issue with Nullable and strings. Rcpp Core team members Kevin and JJ took care of small build nuisance on Windows, and I added in a new helper function, updated the skeleton generator and (finally) formally deprecated loadRcppModule() for which loadModule() has been preferred since around R 2.15 or so. More details and links are below.

Changes in Rcpp version 0.12.5 (2016-05-14)

• Changes in Rcpp API:
  • The checks for different C library implementations now also check for Musl used by Alpine Linux (Sergio Marques in PR #449).
  • Rcpp::Nullable works better with Rcpp::String (Dan Dillon in PR #453).
• Changes in Rcpp Attributes:
  • R 3.3.0 Windows with Rtools 3.3 is now supported (Qin Wenfeng in PR #451).
  • Correct handling of dependent file paths on Windows (use winslash = "/").
• Changes in Rcpp Modules:
  • An apparent race condition in Module loading seen with R 3.3.0 was fixed (Ben Goodrich in #461 fixing #458).
  • The (older) loadRcppModules() is now deprecated in favour of loadModule() introduced around R 2.15.1 and Rcpp 0.9.11 (PR #470).
• Changes in Rcpp support functions:
  • The Rcpp.package.skeleton() function was again updated in order to create a DESCRIPTION file which passes R CMD check without notes. warnings, or error under R-release and R-devel (PR #471).
  • A new function compilerCheck can test for minimal g++ versions (PR #474).

Thanks to CRANberries, you can also look at a diff to the previous release. As always, even fuller details are on the Rcpp Changelog page and the Rcpp page which also leads to the downloads page, the browseable doxygen docs and zip files of doxygen output for the standard formats. A local directory has source and documentation too. Questions, comments etc should go to the rcpp-devel mailing list off the R-Forge page.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. Please report excessive re-aggregation in third-party for-profit settings.

We're excited to announce that Debian has selected 29 interns to work with us this summer: 4 in Outreachy, and 25 in the Google Summer of Code. Here is the list of projects and the interns who will work on them: Android SDK tools in Debian:

• Chirayu Desai
• Kai-Chung Yan
• Mouaad Aallam

APT - dpkg communications rework:

• David Kalnischkies

Continuous Integration for Debian-Med packages:

• Canberk Ko
• Tatiana Malygina

Extending the Debian Developer Horizon:

• Harsh Daftary

Improving and extending AppRecommender:

• Lucas Albuquerque Medeiros de Moura
• Luciano Prestes Cavalcanti

Improving the debsources frontend:

• Aaron Delaney

Improving voice, video and chat communication with Free Software:

• Alok Anand
• Balram P
• Jaminy Prabaharan
• Keerthana Krishnan
• K vin Avignon
• Mateus Bellomo
• Mesut Can Gurle
• Nicolas Reynaud
• Nik Vaessen
• Olivier Gr goire
• Pranav Jain
• Simon D saulniers
• Udit Raikwar

MIPS and MIPSEL ports improvements:

• Jonathan Jackson

Reproducible Builds for Debian and Free Software:

• ceridwen
• Satyam Zode
• Scarlett Clark
• Valerie Young

Support for KLEE in Debile:

• Marko Dimja evi

The Google Summer of Code and Outreachy programs are possible in Debian thanks to the effort of Debian developers and contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor students and outreach tasks. Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the students weekly reports on the debian-outreach mailing-list, chat with us on our IRC channel or on each project's team mailing lists. Congratulations to all of them!

Let's see if I can scrounge through all of my now-organized directories of ebooks and figure out what I haven't recorded here yet. At least the paper books make that relatively easy, since I don't shelve them until I post them. (Yeah, yeah, I should actually make a database.) Hugh Aldersey-Williams Periodic Tales (nonfiction)
Sandra Ulbrich Almazan SF Women A-Z (nonfiction)
Radley Balko Rise of the Warrior Cop (nonfiction)
Peter V. Brett The Warded Man (sff)
Lois McMaster Bujold Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen (sff)
Fred Clark The Anti-Christ Handbook Vol. 2 (nonfiction)
Dave Duncan West of January (sff)
Karl Fogel Producing Open Source Software (nonfiction)
Philip Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (nonfiction)
Andrew Groen Empires of EVE (nonfiction)
John Harris @ Play (nonfiction)
David Hellman & Tevis Thompson Second Quest (graphic novel)
M.C.A. Hogarth Earthrise (sff)
S.L. Huang An Examination of Collegial Dynamics... (sff)
S.L. Huang & Kurt Hunt Up and Coming (sff anthology)
Kameron Hurley Infidel (sff)
Kevin Jackson-Mead & J. Robinson Wheeler IF Theory Reader (nonfiction)
Rosemary Kirstein The Lost Steersman (sff)
Rosemary Kirstein The Language of Power (sff)
Merritt Kopas Videogames for Humans (nonfiction)
Alisa Krasnostein & Alexandra Pierce (ed.) Letters to Tiptree (nonfiction)
Mathew Kumar Exp. Negatives (nonfiction)
Ken Liu The Grace of Kings (sff)
Susan MacGregor The Tattooed Witch (sff)
Helen Marshall Gifts for the One Who Comes After (sff collection)
Jack McDevitt Coming Home (sff)
Seanan McGuire A Red-Rose Chain (sff)
Seanan McGuire Velveteen vs. The Multiverse (sff)
Seanan McGuire The Winter Long (sff)
Marc Miller Agent of the Imperium (sff)
Randal Munroe Thing Explainer (graphic nonfiction)
Marguerite Reed Archangel (sff)
J.K. Rowling Harry Potter: The Complete Collection (sff)
K.J. Russell Tides of Possibility (sff anthology)
Robert J. Sawyer Starplex (sff)
Bruce Schneier Secrets & Lies (nonfiction)
Mike Selinker (ed.) The Kobold Game to Board Game Design (nonfiction)
Douglas Smith Chimerascope (sff collection)
Jonathan Strahan Fearsome Journeys (sff anthology)
Nick Suttner Shadow of the Colossus (nonfiction)
Aaron Swartz The Boy Who Could Change the World (essays)
Caitlin Sweet The Pattern Scars (sff)
John Szczepaniak The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers I (nonfiction)
John Szczepaniak The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers II (nonfiction)
Jeffrey Toobin The Run of His Life (nonfiction)
Hayden Trenholm Blood and Water (sff anthology)
Coen Teulings & Richard Baldwin (ed.) Secular Stagnation (nonfiction)
Ursula Vernon Book of the Wombat 2015 (graphic nonfiction)
Ursula Vernon Digger (graphic novel) Phew, that was a ton of stuff. A bunch of these were from two large StoryBundle bundles, which is a great source of cheap DRM-free ebooks, although still rather hit and miss. There's a lot of just fairly random stuff that's been accumulating for a while, even though I've not had a chance to read very much. Vacation upcoming, which will be a nice time to catch up on reading.

What happened in the reproducible builds effort between March 13th and March 19th 2016:

Toolchain fixes

• Petter Reinholdtsen uploaded naturaldocs/1.51-1.1 which makes the output reproducible. Original patch by Chris Lamb.
• Damyan Ivanov uploaded libpdf-api2-perl/2.025-2 which will make internal font ID reproducible.
• Christian Hofstaedtler uploaded ruby2.3/2.3.0-5 which sets gzip embedded mtime field to fixed value for rdoc-generated compressed javascript data.

Packages fixed The following packages have become reproducible due to changes in their build dependencies: diction, doublecmd, ruby-hiredis, vdr-plugin-epgsearch. The following packages became reproducible after getting fixed:

• adduser/3.114 by Niels Thykier.
• borgbackup/1.0.0-3 by Danny Edel.
• firefox-esr/45.0.1esr-1 by Mike Hommey.
• gzip/1.6-5 by Bdale Garbee, original patch by Valentin Lorentz.
• httperf/0.9.0-5 by Reiner Herrmann.
• leafpad/0.8.18.1-5 uploaded by Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• libsdl1.2/1.2.15+dfsg1-4 by Manuel A. Fernandez Montecelo.
• mpc123/0.2.4-4 by Reiner Herrmann.
• openhpi/3.6.1-1 uploaded by Bryan Sutula, likely fixed upstream.
• pbsim/1.0.3-2 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• pdnsd/1.2.9a-par-3 by Reiner Herrmann.
• phyml/3:3.2.0+dfsg-2 uploaded by Andreas Tille, fix by Kevin Murray.
• polyml/5.6-3 by James Clarke.
• psocksxx/1.1.0-1 uploaded by J rg Frings-F rst, original patch by akira.
• python-pip/8.1.1-1 by Reiner Herrmann.
• reapr/1.0.18+dfsg-2 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• rows/0.1.1-3 uploaded by Paulo Roberto Alves de Oliveira, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.
• seqprep/1.1-5 uploaded by Andreas Tille, original patch by Dhole.
• subliminal/1.1.1-1 uploaded by Etienne Millon, fixed upstream.
• tantan/13-4 by Sascha Steinbiss.
• tzdata/2016b-1 by Aurelien Jarno.
• xpra/0.16.2+dfsg-1 uploaded by Dmitry Smirnov, original patch by Reiner Herrmann.

Some uploads fixed some reproducibility issues, but not all of them:

• lombok/1.16.6+ds-3 by Markus Koschany.
• python-skbio/0.4.2-1 by Kevin Murray.

Patches submitted which have not made their way to the archive yet:

• #818128 on nethack by Reiner Herrmann: implement support for SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH, set LC_ALL to C, and ensure deterministic build order when running parallel builds.
• #818111 on debian-keyring by Satyam Zode: fix the order of files in md5sums.
• #818067 on ncurses by Niels Thykier: strip trailing whitespaces introduced when using dash as system shell.
• #818230 on aircrack-ng by Reiner Herrmann: build assembly code as a separate .o file.
• #818419 on mutt by Daniel Shahaf: use C locale when listing files to be put in README.Patches.
• #818430 on ruby-coveralls by Dhole: ensure UTC is used as the timezone when generating the documentation.
• #818686 on littlewizard by Reiner Herrmann: use the C locale in the script for iterating over the files.
• #818704 on strigi by Reiner Herrmann: sort keys when traversing hashes in makecode.pl.

Package reviews 44 reviews have been removed, 40 added and 5 updated in the previous week. Chris Lamb has reported 16 FTBFS.