I encountered an odd bug recently in my GP code. Large amounts of memory were being used, and was increasing substantially at each generation. I realised the problem was most likely in how the tree was traversed to obtain an output for each input data pattern. This was currently done with an iterative approach (which with post-order traversal is not fun!), as I’d assumed that recursive methods would use more memory.
I’ve found this saying to be particularly true these last couple of weeks. Having passed my confirmation viva I wanted to spend a bit of time cleaning up my code that has got rather bloated with all the recent additions to it. Since I’ve never been formally taught OO programming I decided to brush up on this as well. I bought the “Gang of Four” classic Design Patterns book and decided to implement as much as I could of it in my program.
As part of the PhD programme we have to produce a poster in our second year which are then judged by the head of the research groups. It was the first poster I’ve done so wasn’t too sure about things such as layout, font size etc… but it turned out pretty well in the end, and even won the second prize so was very happy with that! It’s a brief summary of some of the work I’ve been doing over the last 18 months, I decided to focus on the Parkinson’s Disease research as that’s more interesting to the layman rather than my current ensemble work.
As an update to the last post, in pretty much just a day I’ve gotten my website configured with Drupal and it’s much the same as before. As previously mentioned, I had essentially developed my own CMS originally, which provided very similar functionality to what I’m getting from Drupal now. However now it is much easier to make any changes as I don’t need to mess around with the code, and more importantly, the website is far more robust now.
Related to my previous blog post about updating this website, it appears that my current web host don’t offer Python support. This means that until I have the time and energy, this website will still be run by php. This isn’t a big issue but I do want to use Python for everything I can as it is such a brilliant language.
Looking at php CMS options it seems that Drupal will be best for me, it may be a little overkill for just a personal website but it’ll be good to know for the future!
I initially developed this website just to learn a new skill. I wanted to make it from a low level, so I wrote it all from scratch in a text editor with no templates or anything. As it was my first time using PHP, the backend code integrating with the database is rather basic. It’s fine for a small personal website such as this, but now I also manage the website for my hockey league I should probably further these skills and learn better habits.