brianchilders.eth

As part of my learning experience, I'm putting together a ROSbot car (https://www.rosbots.com).  I've gotten the kit, started assembling the frame and pieces and at the point where I will need to start soldering a few pieces together. Eventually what I hope to do is to develop a model using OpenCV and have the car be able to recognize objects around it and be able to self navigate around my home.

So I decided to go an easier route - I've now installed Anaconda and will leverage Jupyter notebooks for my learning exercises. The software was easy to install and run - more later on what I accomplish...

I'm getting some coding done and exploring Python... here is some sample code that I'm fiddling around with.. from __future__ import division # list of users users = [ { "id": 0, "name": "Alex" }, { "id": 1, "name": "Brian" }, { "id": 2, "name": "Cathy" }, { "id": 3, "name": "David" }, { "id": 4, "name": "Erica" }, { "id": 5, "name": "Frank" }, { "id": 6, "name": "Gary" }, { "id": 7, "name": "Hank" }, { "id": 8, "name": "Indigo" }, { "id": 9, "name": "Jason" } ] # relationship of friendship between users friendships = [(0,1), (0,2), (1,2), (1,3), (2,3), (3,4), (4,5), (5,6), (5,7), (6,8), (7,8), (8,9)] # initialize empty array for user in users: user["friends&quo

I managed to get Oracle VirtualBox installed successfully and the Debian Linux distribution as well.  I had to do some additional work, like install pip, sudo, git and update my user id, but the installation was relatively smooth. Based on what I've read, it seems like the python libraries that data scientists use tend to work with python 2.7 - so while inclination might say go with the latest and greatest - do stick with python 2.7 - it may change in the future, but for now this seems like the version to go with. Next up - going to start organizing my projects and start using git.

I am hoping to learn more about the world of data science.  I'm going to focus on three different key areas: (1) statistics (2) programming and (3) subject matter expertise. While I haven't decided which area I want to focus on subject matter wise, I do want to pick up the statistics that are needed to do the analysis and then the corresponding programming techniques that will help me apply the statistics. I thought I'd start by downloading Oracle VM VirtualBox to start, as this will let me run Linux within my Windows workstation.  I also decided on using Debian as my Linux distribution.