My team has a new best RMSE score for the Netflix Prize project, 0.9066. After my last update, we were overtaken by another team in the class. With this submission we are back to first place in the class and have jumped up to 449th place in the world. The class competition finishes on December 17th, so we’re closing in on the end. I’ll post my team’s final report once the dust settles.

Lately, a lot of my time has been dedicated to the Netflix Prize project. It’s part of my CptS 570 Machine Learning class, and the goal is to improve Netflix’s movie recommendation tool. I’ll elaborate on the details of our algorithm later, but here is my team’s current status. We are down to a Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) of 0.9261, which is 2.66% better than what Netflix can do. In the overall worldwide competition, our team is in 1005th place. For now, we are also the leading team in the class. Check out NetflixPrize.com and the class project page for more details.

Earlier I wrote about my application to teach a Cougar Quest workshop. Yesterday I found out that it has been accepted! Out of 94 proposals, mine was one of 36 that were approved. My workshop will run twice this summer, July 20-23 and July 27-30. During the first session, I’ll be teaching a group of 20 7th-9th graders. During the second session, my students will be from grades 10-12. I’ll write more as I start to develop my curriculum and other plans.

I was using lpr to print under Linux the other day, and the page margins kept getting messed up. I played with it for a little bit and finally found some settings that seem to work pretty well. This command sets everything up:

lpoptions -o prettyprint -o page-left=36 -o page-right=36 -o page-top=36 -o page-bottom=36

Today I downloaded and installed Ubuntu 8.10 Intreped Ibex. It’s only been an hour or so, but I’m already very happy with what I’m seeing.

The installation was extremely easy, and the new GUI partitioning tool is especially slick.

For me, the most exciting part was expanded support for different kinds of wireless cards. The OS automatically detected my old Broadcom card and offered to install the driver. This little enhancement saved me hours of frustration!

Kudos to the Ubuntu team and the entire open source community!