Thinking Sands

Author: wmeddie

  • New Years Resolutions

    —

    by

    wmeddie
    in

    It’s a new year, and I feel like I need to make some changes. 2023 was an incredible year for me and Xpress AI, and next year has the potential to be even better if I can make some personal changes. One of which is to get back into writing more hence why I’m restarting…

  • Using your ISP’s built-in VPN in Japan

    —

    by

    wmeddie
    in , ,

    It’s a little known fact that the routers in Japanese ISPs are incredibly full featured when compared to the gateways you get abroad. One feature that is standard in most of them is VPN. In this post I’ll show you how I set-up my home network that allows me to access my GPU desktop from…

  • Hello ND4J

    —

    by

    wmeddie
    in , ,

    I haven’t blogged in over 4 years so I’ve decided to kick-things off again by doing a series on DeepLearning4J which I’m using more and more of recently. DL4J is great because there’s no need to translate the models to something else for production. You deploy them to production by just using them inside a…

  • DL4J post on Qiita

    —

    by

    wmeddie
    in

    I recently made a Japanese post on How to use DL4J for Qiita’s Deep Learning Advent Calendar. Next chance I get I’ll post it here in English. TLDR is use my DL4J g8 templates to get started quickly. Also you can deploy your models in a request/response style using Stateless EJBs.

  • How Cappuccino handles pass-by-reference APIs in Cocoa.

    —

    by

    wmeddie
    in ,

    I’ve been using Cappuccino at work recently and I came across a corner of Objective-J that I previously didn’t know about: how to use enumerateObjectsUsingBlock. One of the nice things about Objective-C is that it has blocks.  Blocks allow you to make functions that take other functions as arguments, all while preserving scope. One of…

  • What worries me about Scala

    —

    by

    wmeddie
    in ,

    I’ve recently been rediscovering podcasts.  I’m particularly fond of the NodeUp podcast, but I also listen to podcasts about Rails, Clojure, and Scala.  The Scala podcast is by far the most academic; taking a shot every time they say the word “type” makes for a pretty nice drinking game. I must admit I like academic…

  • Apple’s JIS Keyboard layout and the ADM3A

    —

    by

    wmeddie
    in ,

    A few weeks ago a blog post on catonmat.com showed pictures of the old terminal that Bill Joy used when he created VI.  Terminals back then didn’t have arrow keys so if you wanted to move the cursor around you held down some kind of modifier and hit the H, J, K or L keys.…

  • Password Maker

    —

    by

    wmeddie
    in ,

    With all the recent database compromises going on lately, I’ve decided to step my passwords up a notch. My old “password scheme” was pretty simple, I had 4 different levels of passwords so that if a lower one got compromised the more sensitive passwords would still be safe.  The flaw in this scheme is that…

  • My first Arduino

    —

    by

    wmeddie
    in , ,

    Yesterday my wife decided to buy yet another sewing pattern book and I decided to tag along.  As a Kindle user, there’s usually very little for me to do at a bookstore.  I usually just look around the IT section of the magazine rack and thumb through the amazing Ubuntu magazine, or Nikkei Linux.  This…

  • Announcing Better Mail

    —

    by

    wmeddie
    in , , ,

    Better Mail for Android on AppBrain http://www.appbrain.com/api/api.nocache.js About a year ago I bought the first Android phone available in Japan for the sole reason of making apps. Unfortunately I’ve had very few itches that needed scratching. About a month ago that changed, because the built-in Gmail app has a fatal flaw. The Problem If you…