Tonight I gave a talk at Clojure PDX on building desktop apps with Electron and ClojureScript.

Building QT and capybara-webkit has always been at best an exercise in yak shaving and at worst an exercise in wizardry, prayer, and laptop damage. For the most part I have been free from problems with it for a while, but a new problem cropped up the most recent time I upgraded my Ruby version and bundled a project that included it:

Yesterday I described my experiences implementing multivariate Gaussian distributions in Julia. I’ve since repeated the exercise in Clojure, for any time you might need to do such a thing on the JVM. I’m using core.matrix for array operations.

I recently worked my way through the latest incarnation of Andrew Ng’s Machine Learning Course on Coursera. One particular method stood out to me as having some potential real-life applications for me: anomaly detection with multivariate Gaussian distributions.

Tonight while updating the Harrisburg Crime Tracker to use Transit (more on how shared data representations help later), I ran into a small issue I didn’t find a whole lot of documentation on and wasn’t immediately obvious to me at first, so I thought I’d share the solution.