From the Texas Libertarian Party platform:

Our silence about any other particular government law, regulation, ordinance, directive, edict, control, regulatory agency, activity, or machination should not be construed to imply approval.

Says it all, really.

I do a lot of programming, in a lot of different languages. Each language evokes a particular sort of mindset when I’m using it, as well: Python and Objective-C are for games, Ruby and C are for research, PHP is for webdev. Within each mindset, though, there’s a fair amount of blending — and I can’t tell you how often I wish I was writing in Ruby when I find myself writing in C.

My usual workflow for research-oriented coding involves prototyping a tool or model in Ruby (fast to write, easy to understand), then porting the final, working version into C for use with real data (my models are usually trained on massive statistical corpora, something Ruby is, unfortunately, ill-equipped to handle). This is all well and good, but I always miss the usability that I can so easily sprinkle into the Ruby version. OptionParser is one such gem; Ruby/ProgressBar is another.

In a moment of frustration, I re-implemented Ruby/ProgressBar in pure, unadulterated C99. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you can grab a copy from my GitHub repository:

git clone git@github.com:doches/progressbar.git

For comparison, here is how you use a progressbar in Ruby:

require 'rubygems'
require 'progressbar'

progress = ProgressBar.new("Loading",100)
(0..99).each do |i| 
  # Do some stuff
  progress.inc
end
progress.finish

…and in C:

#include "progressbar.h"

progressbar *progress = progressbar_new("Loading",100);
for(int i=0;i<100;i++) {
  // Do some stuff
  progressbar_inc(progress);
}
progressbar_finish(progress);

More examples, including custom formatting and indeterminate progress, are in test/progressbar_demo.c.

I just got back from CogSci 2010, to which I had successfully submitted a paper, “Meaning Representation in Natural Language Categorization.” Unfortunately, I wasn’t invited to present it as a talk — but on the upside, I was invited to present it as a poster. As a consequence, I may now write the following sentence, of which I am more proud than practically anything I have done in my life to date:

Fountain, T. & Lapata, M. (2010). Meaning Representation in Natural Language Categories. In S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Squee.

The work I presented deals with whether corpus co-occurrence can be used as a stand-in for norming data, at least in the context of a categorization task; as part of that work I collected a rather large amount of data that I am now making publicly available. The dataset extends the McRae et al feature norms by grouping the words in forty-one categories, and includes norming data, integrated into the standard McRae features, for each of the newly-added category labels.

For over a year now I’ve been wanting to start writing games for the iPhone and iPod Touch — in mid-February I was finally seized by the bug and sat down to figure it all out. The learning curve was pretty huge, frankly — I remember realizing one evening that I was writing code in a language I didn’t know (Objective C) using an IDE I’d never used before (XCode) to work with an API I’d previously avoided like the plague (OpenGL).

Fun stuff.

On the upside, running your own code on the iPhone is really cool — I haven’t felt this much like I was “hacking” (in the classical sense of the term) in a long time. The upshot of it all is that I’ve just released my first game, Levelheaded, for the iPhone. It’s a port of my old Global Game Jam project from last year, Jarhead, updated for the iPhone’s touch input and limited screen real estate. Now, onward with the marketing!