I’ve been growing a lot of sprouts. They’re easy to grow, cheap, and quite nutritious. I can grown 2 bowls of sprouts every 4 days for roughly 25¢. I’m sure I’ll write about the benefits of sprouts sometime soon.

So I’m biking along minding my own business and out of NOWHERE comes this curb. Here’s the damage, note: it’s a bit gory. I was bleeding pretty badly, but I kept biking all the way home. I didn’t go to the hospital because I thought I knew what I needed to do… and it turns out I was pretty close. It didn’t heal without a scar, but at least I didn’t have to pay for universal healthcare.

You already know that I’m an engineer, I recently graduated with a degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering, but did you know that I’m a Civil Engineer as well? Yeah I build bridges in my spare time. Building a safe bridge is a prerequisite to gardening on my neighbor’s roof.

bridge to somewhere, the roof

As you may know from speaking with me, I live on the third floor of my apartment building, located here, and the three buildings to the south of mine are only two stories. This means the windows of my apartment open up to a huge roof, like so:

Last fall I took a data mining course and learned a basic element of problem solving, building a mathematical model out of data. It’s not too hard of a task, it can be accomplished with one key in Matlab, but the lack of basic tutorials on principle component analysis are what drove me to etch out this little space on the internets. I’m by no means an expert on PCA, I simply want to show you how to use it to build a model in Matlab… and as long as I’m doing that I might at well show you the other way I made other models.

While I provide you with the source code for my project I hope this tutorial is helpful without having to dig through those files. Feel free to provide feedback positive or negative.

This plot is really unnecessary. This is just a normalized boxplot of my input variables. I’m doing this to show you I’m working with real data and to remind you to normalize your input variables.

I wanted to see how quickly I could make a website (source) that would track passwords and keep notes… Basically an early version of Passpack or LastPass but without any of the solid security :-P

I was hoping I could do it in a weekend and it took me about a week of work. I’m quicker than that now… but not by too much.