The Coppit Family Daily News

For the last week or so I’ve been working on speeding up an algorithm for formal concept analysis (FCA) that I developed earlier in the year. FCA is a branch of lattice theory in which objects and properties are arranged into maximal sets of related entities. It’s like saying birds lay eggs, mammals nurse their young, but there’s a weird creature called the platypus that doesn’t really fit in either category.

We’re using FCA to build software plans from trace data collected on software that is run with multiple test cases. I developed the algorithm because a tool we were using (ToscanaJ) couldn’t handle the large input we were giving it. Since then we’ve learned of ConExp, which is supposed to be a lot faster. I did a quick comparison of my algorithm to their implementation of the NextClosure algorithm, and it looks like we might beat them. Meghan’s working on a more formal comparison.

Meanwhile I have to turn my attention to a paper… The ICSE formal demo paper deadline is fast approaching…

We took Christopher to a couple fun places around Charlottesville in the days preceding his surgery. One was Safari Zoo:

I think he liked the animals coming up to the car. As you can tell from the videos, Daniel was having flashbacks to a bad giraffe incident when he was a kid.

We also hit Carter’s Mountain for some apple picking. Christopher didn’t seem to be fazed by the pulling of edible fruit from trees.

Yesterday Christopher went through his second CI surgery. The pre-op routine was pretty much the same as before, but this time the anesthesiologist gave him some happy juice before they took him away. That was pretty funny… Christopher’s eyes were half closed and he had a dopey grin on his face. It’s not every day that you see your kid drunk as a skunk.

It turns out that Advanced Bionics had a representative in the OR for his surgery. Apparently they redesigned the electrode array so that it curls more, causing it to hug the inner part of the cochlea more. In theory this would allow the electrodes to more directly stimulate the auditory nerve, but they said that they haven’t seen a big difference in trials.

Anyway, afterwards we chatted with the representative, mostly because we wanted to hassle her about when the Auria was going to come out. We’re kinda tired of the body-worn processor, and can’t use the behind-the-ear model if we want to be able to trade it in for the new one when it comes out.

Bad to the surgery: Christopher’s recovery was pretty much the same as before. Today he’s been very wobbly on his feet, more than I remember before. The good news is that this time he isn’t messing with his bandage, so maybe we can keep the cup on for a full two days.

Here are some photos:

I’ve released a new version of the Category Access Wordpress 2 plugin. This plugin allows the blog maintainer to restrict access to posts belonging to particular categories on a user-by-user basis.

New changes:

• Fixed a bug where categories with special characters like “‘” would incorrectly be protected.
• Fixed long-standing pagination of posts bugs.
• Removed next_post functions, since this should be fixed in Wordpress now.

Download it on my code page.