Miloping

On Saturday we went shopping at Jung Ceylon. This shopping centre is situated in the Patong beach area and turns out to be a massive shopping complex. It is split into 4 main areas.

Maybe I was wrong, I think we actually went on the elephant ride on Thursday, but hopefully no one noticed. Anyway on Friday we went canoeing in the caves around Phuket. The mornning started being picked up from the hotel at around 9am. While our hotel is nice and quiet it is a long way away from anything in the surrounding countryside. When we arrived we were taken by boat out to the islands.

A few days have gone by since my last post. We went to Phuket Central festival and it was a little disappointing, lots of shops, but not that great. We were there from about 12 until 2pm. On the way the hotel shuttle bus went via the gems factory, where Mrs Stevens was able to pick up a pair of earings and a nice necklace.

Mrs Stevens and I have been hanging out in the Chandara resort in Thailand for the past few days. It is a tranquil location, our room consists of a lounge, kitchen, giant bed, large bathroom with a massive bath, and a balcony with two deck chairs and a swimming pool. Everything is either in a nice stone or a dark wood, and our room is located near all the resort facilities.

This is the first week free from the shackles of routine, drudgery, and free lunches. And, now enjoying the leisurely submission to every flitting distraction in my headspace, I do so hungrily; reminded by every empty growl from my stomachspace.

With so much time and no one to look over my shoulder, I should probably be curled up in a ball somewhere sleeping. But instead here before you is something I wrote at the beginning of the year, due to a displacement of time in my favor, I present: a Sudoku solver in Ruby!

I am now married. This happened on the 19th September at what was the most stressful and the most fun day of my life. Afterwards we stayed at the Park Hyatt at the rocks which I must say is an awesome hotel. I would like to stay there again sometime. We then spend almost 15 hours flying from Sydney to Phuket. We made a stop over in Hong Kong where Ying spent a lot of time looking into shop windows as the shops are not open at 5am.

When we got to Phuket, I was amazed at the lush vegetation and pleasant weather, after just getting out of a Sydney winter. The hotel itself, I think its called the Chandara, is really awesome, we get our own private spa, the people are very friendly, the food is awesome and all the amenities are good quality. I have to go swimming now so I will write aggain soon

I made a Wordle.

Python has become somewhat of a hobby of mine during the weekends. So I was very excited to hear about pyday. I took this opportunity to participate and eventually submitted “G Underground”. “G” is a character I made up in university when I was playing around with c and the curses library. Since I only had ascii to work with, I chose a letter to represent the hero of the quest, the letter “G”, battling it out against letter “T”s (Trolls) in a alphanumeric landscape.

Fast forward a few years and I have not done that much game programming, except the occasional pyweek . I have been working as a professional programmer and these challenges always provide me with many opportunities to learn new things.

Since it was an individual competition I got to choose an different aspect of game programming.

This game is about kicking blocks around to collide them with other blocks of the same color. When two or more blocks collide they will destroy all adjacent blocks of the same color.

The level is finished when all blocks have been destroyed.

Download the source

So here is a description of something I did a couple of weekends ago at Uni for my thesis. Hopefully you'll get some idea what I spent 3 years doing.

What I needed to do was a statistical significance test, that is, comparing two models to see if their results were actually any different. This guy, Dan Bikel, had written a script to do this, here: Randomized Parsing Evaluation Comparator. Only problem was it was in Perl, which as we all know, sucks hard, and also blows. So I rewrote the thing in Python, yay Python!

Here's what it does. You take two input files that look like this:
Sent. Matched Bracket Cross Correct Tag
ID Len. Stat. Recal Prec.