Miscellaneous...

I hadn't blogged since May, and many things happened since that time.

In June, together with my wife we traveled to England and spent a week, visiting different cities. Although we visited not so much, so we're planning to make another trip to Scotland, and maybe other parts of UK.

Cycling was also big time consumer (this year I made about 2,000km on bicycle), but I like this activity, and planning to upgrade my bicycle next year to something speedy - don't know yet what to select - road bike or time trial bike...

Book-related

As usual, I read a lot, investigating new (for me) technologies & best practices.
Together with Manning's team, I participated (as technical proofreader) in publishing of two books: Mahout in Action, and Tika in Action. First book was very interesting for me, as I planned to study this technology anyway, and work with Manning allowed me to dig more deeply into all examples, code, etc. This book is different from other machine learning books because it shows how to solve ML tasks with Mahout in practice.
Week ago another book-related project also was finished - Russian translation of well-known book on type theory - Types and Programming Languages by Benjamin C. Pierce. This project lasted for 3 years, but at the end we produced high-quality translation of this book (and it's free in ebook form!). I hope that I'll receive paper book shortly.
And more projects are in progress ;-)

Programming & other IT-related projects

I also continued to experiment with different technologies to get new experience (not related to work) - Mahout, Lucene, Hadoop, Erlang, Haskell, and many other.
Some work also was made with Clojure, but not so much, I hope that I'll have more free time at winter.
Also I participate in AI & ML classes from Stanford, and like them a lot, although not so much free time left. First is more hard, as it requires to do more study on your own, seeking for new information, etc. (I forgot many things since I finished university :-) While second is more self-contained - you're usually don't need to search much in external sources to make your homework. Some time was needed to read Octave manual, but this was not so complicated. Although now I'm also studying how to program with R, to help my wife with thesis.


More things happened & happening, than I wrote about, and I'll try to blog more often.