Silicon Valley Code Camp

Next weekend, a free software developer "code camp" in Silicon Valley will be held at Foothill College. I'm not going, but I hope some notes about functional programming will be posted on their website. I'm not using functional programming and do not plan to until I've tried it out on some small projects. I am trying to learn more about it due to the influence of Douglas Crockford and his javascript talks. Hopefully by the end of the month I will checkout the basics of the why and what of functional programming. 

p-value again

A NY Times statistics article describes p-value in a more approachable manner than what I noted earlier. 

Today, this kind of number is called a p-value, the probability that an observed phenomenon or one more extreme could have occurred by chance. Results are usually considered “statistically significant” if the p-value is less than 5 percent.

So the null hypothesis would lead us to use a probability distribution of chance. Statistical hypothesis testing can then disprove this hypothesis by showing that the observation or something more extreme is unlikely to have occurred if the cause were random because calculating the probability based on this picked distribution shows its chances at less than 5 percent.

I believe doing it this way helps make testing the null hypothesis repeatable, but I haven't found an approachable explanation yet.

Machine Learning On Coursera By Andrew Ng

The machine learning class on Coursera by Dr. Andrew Ng is helping people all over the globe. Watching the videos and doing the assignments takes quite a lot of time and can be a struggle. After work, people can feel reluctant to sit in front of a computer for a couple more hours. But, it has been reported in the past that thousands of people, around 10%, are finishing. I'm not sure what the numbers are for the last session of the course that has recently ended. The professor tweeted he is going to work for Baidu now. Yet, another session appears to be scheduled to start June 16. Right now, I am half way through and am glad to restart this path because it seems like machine learning has been used in many applications, such as autonomous vehicles and computer vision. I don't yet see exactly how I will apply this, but I still feel grateful to Coursera and Dr. Ng for taking the time to help the world with this machine learning class.

notes of Windows 7 install

Over the weekend, an install of Windows 7 as a guest in virtualbox went smoothly. However, after a few hours of use, upon shutdown over 100 updates needed to be applied. A message warned not to force a shutdown, so the laptop needed to sit over an hour waiting for the updates. I have not tried slipstreaming Windows 7 but may need to investigate that option next time. An article about slipstreaming Windows 7 is published at PC World. It looks like a rather involved process however.

android studio install notes for app project

Android Studio Install Notes:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17474963/android-studio-tools-jar-file-is-not-present-in-classpath/17827697#17827697

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17033726/android-studio-error-after-studio-sh

Linux Mint Maya

http://developer.android.com/sdk/installing/studio.html

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/17033726/android-studio-error-after-studio-sh

sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jdk

Environment Variable -- sudo nano /etc/environment adding the following line:
JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.7.0-openjdk-i386

Reboot

Downloaded:http://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-1.8-bin.zip

unpacked and moved to android-studio/plugins/gradle after backing up previous gradle folder

use local gradle distribution
android-studio/plugins/gradle

sudo update-alternatives --config java

after git clone import project not open project

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16736856/what-should-be-in-my-gitignore-for-android-studio-project

manually add libs and modules

Tools -> Android -> SDK Manager
android support library
android 2.2