hammertoe

Bit late with last week's weeknote as I was off camping for a few days with my daughter. It was great to get away just the two of us and the dog. The first two days were baking hot, so we spent most of the time by the pool and sunbathing. Then some massive storms came past, just missed us during the day, but there was some very heavy rain overnight. I love the sound of the rain on the roof of the van.

We watched Hamilton one evening. I've been wanting to watch this for a while, but just not had time. Sarah has watched it about 15 times now and is pretty obsessed with it. We watched it in the van on an iPad with a bag of popcorn and the sun going down behind us... was fantastic :)

On the way back, the original plan was to take a detour home via Hursley (IBM's headquarters here in the UK) and meet up with some colleauges for a socially distant picnic. But the traffic was so bad onthe way back I had to abort and head straight home. Shame as would have been good to see them. Some of which I've still not met face to face as I started this role two weeks before lockdown!

Work-wise things have been busy, I've been working on Choirless for a lot of the time. The response we are getting is amazing. I had a meeting yesterday with my boss' boss, Johanna, who is the parent of a school marching band student. She has introduced me to the president of their marching band and we are hoping to use Choirless for a mass virtual marching band performance. I've tested the scalability up to 308 parts, but we might be going double that as they want to also collaborate with several other bands in the vicinity.

We also had a meeting today with some people in IBM Developer Marketing who interviewed us all about doing a piece. Actually whilst I was camping, I did a video interview from my van with some other people in a different marketing division who are producing a video about some of the Call for Code entries. And tomorrow we have a meeting with some people interesting in a potential collaboration with the Soweto Gospel Choir for a piece to show during the Call for Code awards next month. Oh, and someone else wants to do a Choirless session during an IBM conference next month. So not only will we be talking about the development of it and how we scaled it with IBM Cloud, but we will also be recording a live performance with the conference delegates (as they will be attending remotely still) in a break in the conference.

We've been working closely with an IBMer in Canada who has composed his own song about 2020 and lockdown and performed the vocals and guitar of that and now looking to get others involved in the performance too. He has been fantastic at finding little bugs and edge cases in the system.

So uh... yeah... so much Choirless!

Besides that I did a live stream Twitch session today on Tensorflow.js and loading a model trained in Python into the browser and getting it to detect handwritten digits from the webcam.

This was a pretty tense one, as up until 5 minutes before the stream it didn't appear to be working at all. Then during the stream I managed to refine it and get it to recognise the digits. I needed to draw them a bit thicker on the cards, and also increase the contrast before passing the image to the neural network.

On Thursday I am doing a workshop on Generative Adversarial Networks and going to teach people how to train a neural network to colour black and white images. Should be interesting, although the challenge is going to be to get it to work in the timeframe available. Sometimes these neural networks can take hours to train, and I'd like to do something small enough that everyone can have a go at.

I also spent some of this weekend updating an old server I have and getting backups working properly on it, but I'll post about that separately.

Anyway... enough rambling... stay safe all!