SidesWays Blog

Found a list of holidays and customized it for company use. Thought some others might find it handy. https://github.com/davesides3/holidays

Some links for various eye-tracking options: Tobii (hardware, variety of markets including gaming, well-established) https://gaming.tobii.com/ iMotions (hardware, higher-end research, well-established) https://imotions.com/eye-tracking/ GazeRecorder (Webcam Eye-Tracking with an API GazeFlow) https://gazerecorder.com/ https://gazerecorder.com/gazecloudapi/  (embed in your own webapp) RealEye (Webcam Eye-Tracking on a study-based platform) https://www.realeye.io/ Hawkeye (iOS using TrueDepth camera, limited to latest iOS devices) https://www.usehawkeye.com/ Skyle for iPad (hardware, new in 2020) https://eyev.de/en/ EyeZag (camera-based, no longer accepting new customers) https://eyezag.com/ WebGazer.js (camera-based, browser, open source) https://webgazer.cs.brown.edu/ SeeSo (mobile eye-tracking) https://seeso.io/ https://visual.camp/ Useful: 10 Most Used Eye Tracking Metrics and Terms https://imotions.com/blog/10-terms-metrics-eye-tracking/ And a summary related to mobile games: TrackMa

Although I use R extensively in my work, samples can't be shared because of non-disclosure agreements with my clients. For this reason, I'm starting to build a portfolio of samples of my own work with R for data analysis and other tasks. Since COVID-19 is in the news now and I have experience with clinicaltrials.gov from my work with a biotech startup ( www.biostreamtech.com ), it seemed like a good way to start. The source code can be found at:  https://github.com/davesides/covid_19_clinical_trials Some techniques used daily include: select to remove, order, rename columns mutate to add columns or modify values in columns filter to eliminate rows from a data frame arrange to order rows in a data frame group_by and summarize to pivot replace_na to replace NA with (typically) zeros read_tsv (csv, etc.) to read delimited files packages readxl and writexl to read and write Excel files Many more examples to come, but I wanted to post something as a starting point.

In these times of social distancing our monthly poker group wanted to find a way to meet virtually. Since we play many variations of poker (we've been meeting for about 25 years) we needed a solution that was flexible and also provides the interaction of a virtual BYOB happy hour. The solution we found will only work with a group that you trust and is based on the honor system. Don't consider this a competitor for PokerStars or another online casino. Here's what we tried this past Friday night that worked pretty well... (images blurred to protect the "innocent" 😉) We used Whereby (Pro Plan - $10/month) for the video group call supporting up to 12 callers comfortably. They offer a free plan if you want to try it out with up to 4 people (bridge, hearts or spades would work well with 4). This solution is very convenient since it does not require an install and we wanted to minimize technical support issues with the group. For the card table interaction we us

Just some notes from my learnings around Git and AWS... Assuming you're not the one responsible for granting access to AWS CodeCommit in your organization and you receive three pieces of information, something like this: 1) ssh://git-codecommit.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/v1/repos/project_name 2) user: ABC123 3) Private Key (see below) The following article will be helpful: Setup Steps for SSH Connections to AWS CodeCommit Repositories on Windows After installing Git  consider installing software like Tortoise Git  for convenience. You might also want to install an SSH client like PuTTY . As part of the AWS instructions, you'll need to edit the config file in the c:\users\<username>\.ssh folder: Host git - codecommit .*. amazonaws . com User ABC123 IdentityFile ~/. ssh / codecommit_rsa and in the same folder, the codecommit_rsa file should contain the RSA key provided similar to the one below. Note that you might have to remove extra

This past year or so I've been focused on my work with a startup company creating a 3D videogame (written in Unity) using eye-tracking technology to help those with Autism Spectrum Disorder improve social skills, emotion recognition, and eye contact. Check out the website for more detail ( www.biostreamtech.com ). A more established company in the "BioSoftTech" market is Akili Interactive . Now that the product is in clinical trials, I am moving to a part-time contract position and expect to be able to write more often here. I'm offering technical product/project management services too.

In my travels as a software product manager I've experienced repeated requests to create basic form entry into a SQL database for reporting. Typically these requests don't have a significant budget behind them and may involve a smaller number of users. Pointing non-technical staff to Google Forms or similar isn't that helpful and ideally we'd like to have the data easily incorporated into enterprise reporting (Office 365 environment in particular). Products like QuickBase have been used in the past, but aren't integrated well in our O365 environment and have significant licensing costs. There are other products (PHP/MySQL solutions seem to be common) for easy specification of forms using WYSIWYG editors, but I'm looking for something that lets me define the input form and related SQL tables/columns directly. I've recently been impressed with a SQL Report Builder interface in an application we use at work ( Genius SIS ). It provides a quick way to create