Week Notes: 22

Jun 29, 2022 23:22 · 882 words · 5 minutes read weekly-reviews

At the moment it’s very cold in Nairobi. I reckon it’s the coldest it’s ever been here. Also, I feel a bit worried that I may have had a “busy” [unproductive] week, and I honestly don’t know how to remedy that—it just is. I’ve been feeling down, and I think it may have something to do with the absurdly cold weather. This week, I hope I’ll do better—I’m getting much needed support/help from my partner whose been keen with regards to checking in on me.

Free And Open Source(FOSS) Work

  • I fixed some broken GN2/GN3 tests. In the process, I had to disable python-ipfshttpclient—it doesn’t support python > 3.7 at the time of this writing. Here are the relevant PR’s: #95, #94.
  • Reviewed and merged some work on correlations: #93. I merged this patches upstream: de3f9fcbca, f6d7174086, 6384260b56 and bff5748124. This work is promising since it means that correlations inside the purview of GN2 will be significantly faster. I may have to take up this work this coming month—at least ironing out any emergent issues—since the person who’s been working on this has to study for their finals.
  • Checked out LMDB for something related to work—instead of storing uploaded data to files, we could use this instead.
  • Sent out a patch related to converting case-attributes to RDF. Here are the relevant commits: 145c06b8e6, 9a5161536b, and c92bcce1f0
  • Meeting with one of the GN2 core developers to discuss his work on Quality Control and to check in on how it overlaps with some of my work. Very unrelated to the meeting, but I agreed to be his accountability partner with regards to some parser he’s writing for his blog (parsing pollen files to skribilo format).
  • Macros! Recently, we got a new dataset (Mouse data). I’ve been working on writing some front-end for parsing it to RDF. At the moment, I’ve put that on hold, and I’m working on putting this dataset to SQL, and having our DB admin check that—review—out. My current approach is to have a set of hygienic scheme macros do the parsing for me to generate a SQL file. I’m torn between having a SQL file, and just executing executing queries in Scheme. The priority here for me is to have something that works, particularly with the our current MariaDB schema. I hope to be done with this by the beginning of the next stand-up. I have to admit, while working on this, I got myself in to some un-productive rabbit hole where I spent quite some time looking into the huge field of lisp macros (and why they are a big deal). Nevertheless, exciting stuff! I hope to give a presentation/talk on Macros sometime this year.

Grad School

  • Read 2 interesting papers (shared in one of my units):
    • “Visuals That Really Work. Know what message you’re really trying to communicate before you get down in the weeds” by Scott Berinato.
    • “The Good, the Bad, and the Biased: Five Ways Visualizations Can Mislead [and How to Fix Them]” by Danielle Albers Szafir.
  • Requested someone from iLab to be my official supervisor.

Long Form Reading

I didn’t do much long-term reading. I’ve been out of my element. Hopefully, this coming week, I’ll be back to my usual self.

Started reading: “Let Over Lambda.”

Personal & Miscellaneous

  • Switched to a new bullet journal. The old one got filled up. I’m still using the Eregatti leather bound notebooks—they have proved to be reliable for my journalling needs.
  • Did, albeit inconsistently, some visualization exercise recommended to me by my therapist.
  • In my $HOME/bin directory, I renamed all my scripts to begin with a “,” [comma] after reading this article.
  • Got around to fixing some very subtle emacs bug whereby my GNU Emacs init set-up always called Elpa/Melpa on start-up. Fixed it here.
  • I have been practicing typing regularly. My goal is to reach a comfortable typing speed of 100 WPM on my dvorak-p layout.
  • Started using GNU Hyperbole for my day to day computing.
  • Had a look at the framework laptop. It’s about time a got a new laptop and I want to save up to buy a new one. My current laptop is perhaps approaching it’s end-of-life. My track-pad (I don’t use this), some USB ports, and the microphone don’t work at all.
  • Last weekend, I had a painting session with my partner. This was mad fun! Winded up with a painting of Saitama—I’ll make a blog post entry of this later.
  • Prince Kaybee recently released a new album: “Gemini.” This album is dope and I highly recommend it.
  • Tried configuring GNUs to use swish-e, and some time later namazu search indices. I wound up using NotMuch for search indices.
  • I’ve been watching a lot of One Piece.