I’ve been a little busy … well, very busy … this last year, so here is a little update about projects in my life. I finished up my masters thesis this last semester, and started work toward my Ph.D. in computer science at UIC. I am researching rationality in multiagent settings for the UIC Multi Agent Systems laboratory. Particularly, I am looking at ways to update POMDP models from agent experience. Between school, various freelance projects, and a short year long career at CashNetUSA, I’ve been pretty busy and haven’t been posting much, hopefully that will change.
I just discovered this very cool tip. If you want a colored man pages, adding the following to your environment does it:
export LESS_TERMCAP_mb=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_md=$'\E[01;31m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_me=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_se=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_so=$'\E[01;44;33m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_ue=$'\E[0m'
export LESS_TERMCAP_us=$'\E[01;32m'
I found the tip while searching for a way to preserve the colored output of grep after it has been piped into less. ‘less -r’ preserves the terminal escape sequences from the input. The following will get preserve the colors:
grep --color=always <search_term> | less -r
Origin of Wealth
is a very entertaining and captivating survey of recent developments in economics. He repeatedly takes traditional economic theories to task for failing to match real world empirical data while painting a picture of the economy as a complex, adaptive, and evolutionary system rather than the traditional overly simplistic system of market equilibrium. This is definitely worthwhile read.
I just returned from a month long vacation in Europe. My wife and I took a budget (hostels and Easy Jet) tour of Europe starting in Ireland, and moving through Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Holland, Germany, and England. The trip was a blast, but I’m still glad to be back home. You can see pictures of our trip on Jen’s Picasa album.
While on the trip, I decided to spend more time maintaining this blog. We will see how strong my resolve to do so really is in the next few months. However, since I am paying for the blog, I may as well make more regular use of it. In addition, I think the writing could prove to be therapeutic.