About a month ago, FSharp.Data  released version 1.1.9, which contains some very nice improvements – you can find them listed on Gustavo Guerra’s blog. I was particularly excited by the changes made to the CSV Type Provider, because they make my life digging through datasets even simpler, but couldn’t find the time to write about it, because of my recent cross-country peregrinations. Now that I am back, let’s talk about why this update made me so happy, with a concrete example. My latest week-end project [...]

That's right.. the type provider everyone has been waiting for, the choose your own adventure type provider! This is completely pointless and silly, something I just wrote this afternoon.  I had various discussions with Phil Trelford about this and finally decided to do it. Unfortunately none of the real CYOA books are out of copyright and there appears to be very little in the way of other free ones that I can  find.  I did however find this one rather silly story on smashwords which is free, it's not qui[...]

It looks like this summer will be my strangest vacation in a while – I’ll be taking a F# road trip of sorts in August, talking about F# at user groups all over the United States. How this crazy plan took shape exactly I am not quite sure in retrospect, but I am really looking forward to meeting all the local communities – this will be fun! As of July 13th, here is the plan: July 31, Sacramento: “Coding Dojo: a gentle introduction to Machine Learning with F#” August 8, Houston: “An Introduction to F# for th[...]

Besides having one of the coolest names around, Random Forest is an interesting machine learning algorithm, for a few reasons. It is applicable to a large range of classification problems, isn’t prone to over-fitting, can produce good quality metrics as a side-effect of the training process itself, and is very suitable for parallelization. For all these reasons, I thought it would be interesting to try it out in F#. The current implementation I will be discussing below works, but isn’t production ready (y[...]

Introduction This article will introduce Last-Fi – an F# powered internet radio player that uses a Raspberry Pi and Last.Fm services.  The motivation behind this work was to both build something fun and useful for the Raspberry Pi that interfaces with various pieces of hardware, but can also show off some features that F# is great at within a hardware context. The result is Last-Fi – a highly asynchronous and stable music player.  It is based around Last.Fm, but because it uses MPD to play music it only re[...]