Code With Jim

Continuing with my Wolfram Mathematica Trial Experience... I watched and went through some more Mathematica introduction videos, read lots of Mathematica documentation and also going through the Wolfram Lab Online again a few times. There are some major learning curves and Mathematica is a lot different from normal programming language. Sometimes there is a lot of interesting "shortcuts", say like: FindFaces[] , WordCloud[] . Sometimes I got a little confused on how one can do iterations. Normally FOR LOOP concept is introduced early, but in Wolfram, because everything is EXPRESSIONS and ENTITY (like OBJECTS), sometimes it gets quite quirky. Mind you I am still in the first impression and having to look at many tutorials. Lots of NEAT EXAMPLES from documentation, but sometimes I got lost. I found Wolfram to be really awesome with LIST and generating list. It's almost too easy when it works visually. I cannot explain them with my own words yet, but there are

Now how did we end up here? Wolfram Mathematica Installation I installed Mathematica on both on Mac and PC, it was a pretty heavy 2.5 GB download and when installation completed, one will end up with 7-8 GB of hard disk space occupied. I installed Mathematica on both on Mac and PC, it was a pretty heavy 2.5 GB download and when installation completed, one will end up with 7-8 GB of hard disk space occupied. And THEN, there is this annoyance where the license can only be activated on 1 machine. Switching from my Windows desktop environment to my MacBookPro, and I got this popup requesting System Transfer for the license. This is a typical commercial app :( Wolfram do feels like a Adobe Photoshop or Autodesk software (Maya, 3dsmax) or big bundled tools packaged. I still have to remind myself all the time that “Wolfram is a paid commercial app” . It brings back my nightmares a bit of having to deal with commercial apps. No matter what, Python and Jupyter migh

Can you tell what it is? Computer Vision. Yesterday, I spend almost whole day exploring this opencv module using Python. What I discovered was revealing. Even at the very basic level, I could produce some interesting Image and Video manipulation using all the code collected from documentation and many, many blog tutorials. If you are a total noob like me, I am still getting used to knowing that the CV in OpenCV means Computer Vision! Actuallly, I recalled that I did try to get into OpenCV few years back ago, when I knew no Python and when Python opencv module was probably still early. It was all C++ code and it was a little bit too hard for me. I read a couple of books about opencv at the library, I did not understand a single thing. That was back then. Today, for strange reason, with a bit of knowledge of Python, I can go a little further. EDGE DETECT IN OPENCV Me holding you know what. What leads me this far is my curiosity on how we can replicate Wolfram Langu

This is going to be a really quick blog post. Fine Tuned "Ada" Edge Detect result. IMAGE & WOLFRAM ALPHA APP Last night, I was again exploring this Wolfram Alpha app on the iPhone, which I paid for extra few dollars to get "Image" upload feature. I am curious about this kind of thing, so I feed in a photo I took the other day of this very vivid photos of rainbow wings on the street: I give extra input "Edge Detect" and naturally Wolfram Alpha app can do the Edge Detect thing. And I also tried "Posterize" filtering. That is pretty impressive because of these things: It supposed to detect the image and predict what the image is, rarely, but sometimes it can give you the right guess. It gives some Mathematical analytic, sometimes it gives back location of the image  It gives you some options of what "filter" you can apply to the image It gives user a very easy way to process INPUT and OUTPUT. Pretty fa

Turtle slowly walks in spiral in search for Zen of programming. Over the weekend, I am again searching and exploring Jupyter Notebook in a heuristic fashion. I indeed found some interesting modules along the way that worth nothing, and as well discovering a few more *hickups*. Basically, I have a need to find enough "visual" modules, probably under 10 modules, that give me starting tools so that I could create some interesting Image Output, in the way that Wolfram Language can. Wolfram Lab Cloud indeed is powerful visually. I don't know how to explain, but being able to query Planets images (or all kind of stuff), and then seeing the list as image picture of some sort, then filtering the list or further scrambling the images... are brilliant. So, I do have come to some realization that a lot of codes are to be required and studied in order to be able to make some of the "cool stuffs" that Wolfram can do much easier. Yet, still, there is a good feel