Ruby Kaggle

I promised I'd put up my ruby code from the kaggle tutorial, and then I never did. Bad me.

Things I have learned today

I started today trying to get tab completion working in jruby / irb / windows 7. That happens to be one of the things that I did not learn today. If you figure it out or know how feel free to respond on SO: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13381560/how-to-enable-irb-tab-completion-in-jruby - I'm really starting to think that it's a jRuby 1.7 problem. Maybe sometime I'll have the opportunity to install 1.6.8 and see if it works there.

Anyway, today has been spent trying to make IRB more usable. I've used IRB for little code tests here and there, but I think that it's a great tool for the toolbox, and I'd really like to get more use out of it. So I tried to make it fit my development style better, and thus the tab completion. (I've found the IRB tab completion VERY handy when you don't have docs around; i.e. when I'm offline)

In trying to fix the tab completion I've installed a whole host of things to make stuff better.

Kaggle Titanic Tutorial

I've been playing with the Kaggle Titanic tutorial for the last couple of days, and while I'm having fun with it, I was a little put off. The tutorial has a walkthrough of how to do analysis with python, and I was having trouble working with the examples they were doing. At first I thought it was just the python language, but I eventually came to realize something else.

Spacing

When I went through college in the 90s, they made me change to putting two spaces after a period.

Now I'm told that the convention has changed and there should only be one space after a period.

...

Fact: it's hard to change a habit after almost twenty years. PLEASE STOP CHANGING THE CONVENTION.

Data Science

Data science just sounds really corny as a name - maybe it's just that "science" is overused as a term these days. As much as I like Mythbusters, I cringe every time they claim they're doing "science". They have a really cool program, and it's neat to see things in slow motion (like a rocket-propelled car) but Mythbusters has only a passing relationship with the scientific method. I also cringe when they have a sample size of two. TWO IS NOT A SAMPLE.