I think it's easier to learn a language by having things you want to talk about than by forced reading. You should pick a project, then a language that lends itself to the task. Something entertaining. Perhaps a video game? Something easy. Whack a mole?
You could take pictures of all the kids (Setup a web cam, form a line, and you've got ~25 jpegs of little faces at about the same size / resolution.) Make a 2 layer stage to create the illusion of coming out of a mole hole between the foreground and background layers.
Assemble the script so that every few seconds a timer signals a function to pick a random hole, position a random kids face below it, and slide the image up and down. Add a script to position a hammer over the cursor. Add a mouse down script to change the image of a hammer to one striking. Add a mouse up script to increase the players scores and cue a sound effect if they hit someone.
This seemed like a fun little project, so I registered on netflix and downloaded the file (which decompresses to almost 4gb worth of numbers.) They give you a list of movie IDs, user IDs, and ratings.
Your job, if you choose to accept it, is to guess the correct ratings (1-5) for a random slice off a server log after the ratings have been cut out. If you can guess the missing ratings for various movies better than the system can.. you collect a cool $1 mil.
The problem is that 4gb worth of user ratings is worthless without more data. You can average the ratings or match users up with others that rated movies similarly.. but that's about it.
Having users fill out a small questionaire, pairing them up with others with similar tastes, and using their purchase histories would be infinitely more useful and less complicated than doing it with 4GB worth of numbers 1 through 5 alone.
I really hope they use more data than this for their current method of recommendations. (and if they do, shouldn't they release that data if they expect people to come up with a better algorithm.. privacy concerns aside?)
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I think it's easier to learn a language by having things you want to talk about than by forced reading. You should pick a project, then a language that lends itself to the task. Something entertaining. Perhaps a video game? Something easy. Whack a mole?
You could take pictures of all the kids (Setup a web cam, form a line, and you've got ~25 jpegs of little faces at about the same size / resolution.) Make a 2 layer stage to create the illusion of coming out of a mole hole between the foreground and background layers. Assemble the script so that every few seconds a timer signals a function to pick a random hole, position a random kids face below it, and slide the image up and down. Add a script to position a hammer over the cursor. Add a mouse down script to change the image of a hammer to one striking. Add a mouse up script to increase the players scores and cue a sound effect if they hit someone.
I would suggest AS3 in Flex Builder.
Set aside a week...
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/
Apparently they used a song from a band I was in back in high school (6 yrs ago). Random finding that on /. in a paper on princeton's server.
This seemed like a fun little project, so I registered on netflix and downloaded the file (which decompresses to almost 4gb worth of numbers.) They give you a list of movie IDs, user IDs, and ratings. Your job, if you choose to accept it, is to guess the correct ratings (1-5) for a random slice off a server log after the ratings have been cut out. If you can guess the missing ratings for various movies better than the system can.. you collect a cool $1 mil. The problem is that 4gb worth of user ratings is worthless without more data. You can average the ratings or match users up with others that rated movies similarly.. but that's about it. Having users fill out a small questionaire, pairing them up with others with similar tastes, and using their purchase histories would be infinitely more useful and less complicated than doing it with 4GB worth of numbers 1 through 5 alone. I really hope they use more data than this for their current method of recommendations. (and if they do, shouldn't they release that data if they expect people to come up with a better algorithm.. privacy concerns aside?)