ML class journal

This is my journal for the ML class. Latest entries on top.

2011-10-07

It's 11:03pm and I'm in my bedroom in Mt Riv. I think I'm always going to be in my bedroom in Mt Riv, so I'll probably leave that out in future and just say if I'm somewhere else. Not much has been happening on the ML class front over the last little while. I've been procrastinating pretty badly. I've just been playing StarCraft. Tonight me an TommyTang won 9 games in a row increasing our rank in the Gold division from 22 to 14. Does that count as an achievement? :P We lost our last game. Ben called during that game and I was distracted on the phone with him during the crucial early game. Oh well.

I'm trying to get past my procrastination. I hope tonight I actually do my lecture review for the maths stuff (it's optional, but I don't know the content so it's not really optional for me). I started a TODO list with a view to helping me clarify what I should be working on. I haven't really got that many things to work on. Just the ML class, pcad, pcphpjs and pcwiki when I feel like it. There's really no need for me to be procrastinating, I'm not sure what the problem is. I think the fact that my computer needs a reboot is probably a bit of a factor. Maybe I'll get that out of the way and reload everything so that it's not so slow and unresponsive before I kick off on my work.

I took one of the monitors off my server Orac, which seems to have fixed the problem I was having with corruption on the displays. That's good. I guess I should put it on my TODO list that I need to finish restoring my archives and coming up with an offsite backup solution for Blackbrick and ProgClub.

That's about all for today.

2011-10-06

It's 1:19am, I'm in my bedroom in Mt Riv, and I'm trying to get off to sleep. Decided to start my journal for the ML class. Been thinking about different interpretations of the term "Justice" as a result of some conversation on G. Waleed Kavalec's facebook entry. If the conversation goes on I'll probably elaborate on how the concept of justice is conflated with vengeance, and draw out Islam's "eye for an eye" morality vs. Jesus' "turn the other cheek". Was thinking about how I'd say that I didn't think Jesus was the son of god, any more than I think we're all sons of god. Anyway, that's all entirely beside the point, isn't it?

The ML class doesn't start until next week, but the first week's content is already available. I've started my notes on the ML class and ML class overview pages. Over the past few days I've been making these notes. It takes a long time.

I got my first incorrect answer to the inbuilt quiz questions in the videos. It was a question with a dataset of three points, asking for the value of the Square Error Function for J(0). I answered zero, which was wrong. Can't remember now what I was thinking at the time, although I was shocked that my answer was wrong and it took me a while to figure out why. Anyway, I obviously understand the maths much better now, because I don't even remember what my flawed interpretation was. I'm pretty sure my understanding is solid now. Still a little flakey on remembering some of the stuff from the first set of videos, but I'm getting there. Am pretty happy with my notes, and with my scheme of having the lecture notes and the overview linking in to them. It's all a fair bit of work, but I'm happy enough to do it. I just hope I don't begin having issues with having the time to get it all done, especially as I also pick up the AI class coursework beginning next week.

Now it's 1:33am, and I'm going to try even harder to get to sleep this time! :)