## #include <the_usual>

January 9, 2018

Recently on Freenode channel ##cpp, I saw some code using an include-all-you-can header. The idea was to help beginners to the language, help them start programming without having to remember which header was which, and which headers are needed.

Is that really a good idea?

## Taylor Series

December 19, 2017

A Taylor series for a function $f(x)$ around $x_0$ that is $n$ times differentiable is given by

$\displaystyle f(x) \approx f(x_0)+f'(x_0)(x-x_0)+\frac{f''(x_0)}{2}(x-x_0)^2+\frac{f'''(x_0)}{6}(x-x_0)^3+\cdots$

or

$\displaystyle f(x) \approx \sum_{i=0}^{n} \frac{f^{(i)}(x_0)}{i!}(x-x_0)^i$,

where $f^{(i)}(x)$ is the $i$th derivative of $f$ at $x$.

Have you ever wondered where the coefficients in a Taylor series come from? Well, let’s see!

## Building a large text corpus (Part I)

December 12, 2017

Getting good text data for language-model training isn’t as easy as it sounds. First, you have to find a large corpus. Second, you must clean it up!

## Reinventing the Wheel (or not)

December 5, 2017

About a week ago, some dude drops on IRC that he’s beat memcpy “by a lot”. That’d be interesting, except that we couldn’t get neither code nor test methodology out of him. But, how hard can making a better memcpy be? Turns out, harder than you think!

If you think this is a typical case of “reinventing the wheel”, I mostly agree with you. But while reinventing will be hard, can improvements be made?

## Chaotic Rulers

November 28, 2017

I’m currently working with one of my students on a laser-based range finder. To assess the precision of the device, I needed a calibration piece. Because of the setup, the piece should look like a stair.

The piece should allow a wide range of different readings, say from 1 to 10 centimeters in known increments, say, 1cm. The naïve way of building such a piece is to build a stair with 10 steps. However, if you do it like this, the piece is wide, cumbersomely so. Is there a much better way to do so?

## ANSI Art

November 14, 2017

Since we now have minimal ANSI support, we can use it. Of course, for cute things such as changing text color (red for error, green for OK, etc.), but that’s not very amusing. Let’s make some ANSI ART!!1!

## Semigraphics Compression

November 7, 2017

ANSI art and poor resolution may appeal to the nostalgic, those in want of the time when BBS were still it and the IBM PC’s programmable character set was the nec plus ultra of semigraphics, but they’re not really useful. At best, we can use them to dispense ourselves from using ncurse and still getting some colors and effects

However, “semigraphics” may have their use in lossy data compression, were we allow some data to be lost to gain some more compression. That may be especially true when we have very little computing power or if we want to have many simple CPUs in parallel doing the decoding.