Recipe : Strip Notebook output before comitting
Ever wished you could commit your notebooks without the output cells, but not loose all you outputs locally? This is how.
François Maillet - Blog
François Maillet - Blog
Latest posts
Parallel UNIX utilities
This post covers some usefull Unix utilities to run parallel processes on the command line.
Balance, a sustainable personal finance app
A few months back, I took some time to explore a product idea that had been in the back of my head for a while, looking at a problem that is dear to my heart: climate change. I spend a few months exploring it, working on the business model, talking to potential users, and building out a technical POC to de-risk some of the core mechanics behind the product design. I learned a lot and I think it’s…
Epic Goal Celebration Hack Update: ESPN coverage
ESPN did a mini-documentary on the Epic Goal Celebration Hack .
Building an indoor NFT hydroponics system with Raspberry Pi monitoring
My experience in building an NFT hydroponics garden and monitoring it with sensors and a Raspberry-Pi.
PyCon Canada 2016: Building a real-time image classification web app with Python and MLDB.ai
In this tutorial, we will build a real-time machine learning web app using Python and MLDB.ai. We will use MLDB's Tensorflow integration to use a deep learning model to embed images in a high dimensional conceptual space, and use that representation as features to do transfer learning. This will allow us to build a real-time image classification endpoint.
Human augmentation through artificial intelligence
Showcase of two posts I published recently that relate to a very interesting and important machine learning topic: human augmentation through artificial intelligence.
Is your Chrome bigger than mine? How Chrome ate 21GB of storage
I've been playing with the macOS Sierra Golden Master for a few days and ran into the new storage optimization app that is now included in macOS. It lead me to realise that Chrome was using 21GB of SSH space!
PyCon Canada 2015: Epic NHL goal celebration hack
Video and slides of my PyCon Canada 2015 talk on the "Epic NHL goal celebration hack with a hue light show and real-time machine learning".
Actually, Marty didn't go Back To The Future: Graphing the train sequence of BTTF3
Data-science tribute to BTTF. This post explores if, in the third film, they really make it to 88 miles per hour before they run out of tracks?
Mapping Press Releases in the 2015 Canadian Federal Election
The 2015 Canadian federal election is in its final stretch and college and I thought it would be a great opportunity to collect some data and do some machine learning. Citizen data science in action!
Hacking an epic NHL goal celebration with a hue light show and real-time machine learning
This post does a deep dive on the **epic goal celebration hack**. In a single sentence, I trained a machine learning model to detect in real-time that a goal was just scored by the Habs based on the live audio feed of a game and to trigger a light show using Philips hues in my living room.
Nouvel album: "Une dernière chance"
Je suis heureux d'annoncer la disponibitlié immédiate de mon dernier album intitulé "Une dernière chance".
From prototype to product: Building Datacratic's real-time machine learning platform
Slides from the talk I gave at the 2013 Canadian Conference on Artificial Intelligence.
The Too Good To Be True Filter
At Datacratic, one of the product we offer our customers is our real-time bidding (RTB) optimisation that can plug directly into any RTBKit installation. We’re always hard at work to improve our optimisation capabilities so clients can identify valuable impressions for their advertisers. Every bid request is priced independently and real-time feedback is given to the machine learning models. They…
MapReduce avec parallel, cat et une redirection
Cet article traite d'un problème auquel nous avons fait face était de rendre possible l’exécution de notre modèle sur des centaines de milliers d’utilisateurs dans un temps très court. Il y avait un gain très grand à réaliser en changeant simplement la manière dont nous traitions chaque utilisateur.
La loi 78 et le filtre antipourriel de Vidéotron
Je voulais revenir sur le problème de filtre antipourriel chez Vidéotron qui a eu la malheureuse conséquence de bloquer tous les courriels contenant un lien vers la "Pétition d’appui à la requête en nullité du Projet de loi spéciale 78" pour au moins plusieurs heures hier.
Loi 78: Courriels contenant un lien vers la pétition non livrés par Vidéotron? (Maintenant réglé)
Après avoir vu des rumeurs sur Facebook prétendant que Vidéotron bloquait les courriels de ses membres mentionnant la "Pétition d'appui à la requête en nullité du Projet de loi spéciale 78", je n'y croyais simplement pas. Administrant un serveur web et ayant donc accès aux fichiers journaux (log files), j'ai fait un petit test pour tenter de vérifier ces affirmations.
Hibernating in OSX Lion
In OSX Lion (might also be the case for older versions to), there is no direct way to hibernate a laptop except running out of battery power. The only available option is sleep, which will wake from memory; so it keeps draining the battery. It is possible to change this default behavior with the utility "pmset".
Efficient log processing
I've recently learned a couple of neat tricks to process large amounts of text files more efficiently. Our use-case is efficiently going through tens of gigabytes of logs to extract specific lines and do some operation on them. Here are a couple of things we've done to speed things up.
64-bit Scientific Python on Windows
Getting a 64-bit installation of Python with scientific packages on our dear Windows isn't as simple as running an apt-get or port command...
NTFS Undelete "cannot create disk object" error
My cousin asked me for help with her Vista PC after she tried recovering all the files in her recycling bin, hit cancel as it was doing it, and realized that the Vista meaning of cancel was empty the whole bin and destroy all her files.
Boston Music Hackday
I was thrilled to attend the Boston Music Hackday this week-end. A lot of people hacked up some pretty cool projects, many of us coding until the very early morning Sunday (aka 4am), only to get back up a few hours later (aka 8am) to keep at it until the dreaded 15h45 deadline, when we all had to submit our demos. The organisers did a wonderful job and the event was a success at every level.
ISMIR 2009
My paper "Steerable Playlist Generation by Learning Song Similarity from Radio Station Playlists" was accepted at ISMIR 2009 in Kobe, Japan.
My time at Sun Labs and pyaura
My internship at Sun Microsystems Labs, which has been going on for about 15 months - 9 of those full time at their campus in the Boston area - is coming to an end. During the course of those months, I've met a lot of very smart and fun people, I've worked on very challenging and stimulating problems and I've discovered a bunch of really good New England beers.
Restore sparsebundle extended attributes after rsync
If you rsync a sparse bundle disk image to another Mac without the -E flag (or if you copy it to a non Mac system), you will loose the ability to double click on it in the Finder to mount it. This is because the extended attributes telling the Finder the folder is actually a bundle are lost in the transfer.
trafshow : Display current network traffic
trafshow is a simple little program that displays the current traffic on a network interface.
Make OSX's top behave like Linux's top
OSX's "top" program doesn't quite behave like its Linux counterpart out of the box. For me, the two biggest problems are that processes aren't sorted by CPU usage and the top program itself uses 10% of the CPU because it calculates all sorts of statistics about memory and shared library usage that I personally don't care about.
pfSense : a software alternative to your old router/firewall
My old D-Link router, like pretty much every other router I've ever owned, wasn't very reliable in some way and so I was looking for open-source alternative firmwares like Tomato to flash it with. With the clear lack of effort put into the official firmwares, I thought it couldn't hurt to try. Unfortunately, my router wasn't supported by any third party firmware.
Using filemerge for mercurial diffs
This post talks about a script that brings up OSX's FileMerge program instead of the text-based file comparisons you get with mercurial with doing an "hg diff".
SQLite3, php5 and MAMP
The version of php5 bundled with MAMP doesn't come with sqlite3 support built-in out of the box. Here's how to add it, considering the following setup.
Shrinking sparse bundle images
A sparse bundle image in Mac OS X will grow as you add files to it but never shrink if you remove files inside of it. To reclaim the disk space, you must run the following command.
Ways of setting a CSS property to an element in Google Web Toolkit [UPDATED]
This post talks about ways to add or modify a CSS property of an element in Google Web Toolkit (GWT).
Grub error 21 with Ubuntu
This post talks about Grub returning error 21 after installing Ubuntu.
Google Trends
Je suis tombé sur un outil très intéressant de Google Labs hier: Google Trends.
Comcast imposera une limite de bande passante de 250GB
Comparaison entre le prix de l'internet aux USA versus au Canada.
Interesting addition to unicode
Klignon was just added to unicode!
GWT, state and external application-handled links
I came across the problem of having to open an external link (handled by a specific application, in this case Spotify from a Google Web Toolkit (GWT) application. The link does not load an actual page in the browser but only triggers Spotify to play songs from the artist specified in the link.
How does your web page look in every browser? (Updated)
Every web designer knows that making a web page come out just right in every browser can cause quite a headache, especially when combining elements like W3C standards and IE6. It's hard to have a working copy of all the different browsers and all the different versions to test. Browsershots.org to the rescue!
Tanné de votre emploi? Pourquoi pas astronaute?
L'agence spatiale canadienne vient de lancer une campagne nationale visant à recruter deux nouveaux astronautes. Il s'agit de la troisième campagne de recrutement de l'histoire de l'ASC.
Useful free Mac apps
I'm a relatively new Mac user so I'm keeping a list of some useful free apps that I'm using on my Mac.
Disabling recursive queries on DNS servers
By default, cpanel doesn't disable recursive queries on your DNS server. This post shows how this can be fixed.