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Development: Running TensorFlow in Codeanywhere

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TensorFlow is the open source machine learning framework provided by Google. When it was first announced in 2015, due to the lack of documentations, it was pretty hard for any beginners (or even veteran software developers) to jump start any development using the framework.  Then early this year (in 2018), Google announced the new documentations with complete sets of video as well as written tutorials and (very importantly) self-testing exercises, which you can test yourself how much you have understood in each chapter of the tutorial. These new sets of documentation is a great help to a lot of developers (including myself), to obtain enough understanding of what are the ideas behind TensorFlow, and to start some actual development using the  framework . This article is going to show you how to set up the development environment for TensorFlow in Codeanywhere . For reference, you can read the official setup procedure from the TensorFlow official web site. Step 1 - Create New
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Movie Review: Black Panther (Rating: 4/5)

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This film is about the origin of Black Panther, who first appeared in the Avengers movie - Captain America: Civil War . The story not only explains the background of Black Panther (played by Chadwick Boseman ) , but also describes the challenges of his country, which has obvious references to many of the current events in the real world. The story starts by explaining to us how the fictional African country (i.e.: Wakanda ) come across an unique resource, giving the country the technological advantage for all kinds of development, such as the high-tech suit Black Panther is wearing and his fancy stealth aircraft. Although the country is extremely resourceful, it has hidden its real capabilities from the outside world, so that Wakanda is just another third-world country in the eyes of outsiders. But due to some mistakes made in the past, an outsider is planning to take control of the country for revenge. First of all, this film is so beautiful just for watching. From the extre
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Movie Review: Darkest Hour (Rating: 5/5)

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This film is about how the newly-appointed British Prime Minister Winston Churchill handled the almighty German armies during World War II, while managing all the political conflicts in his own cabinet.  The story starts with Churchill (played by Gary Oldman ) being appointed to be Prime Minister, simply because of political bargaining between the governing and opposition parties. He was not liked by his own party or the King. (yes there was still a King in England in that period of time). But as the story progresses, he was able to unite all the different parties on fighting the powerful Germans, and to form a special friendship with the King due to his refreshing candor. The best thing about this movie is definitely the cast performance. Aside from the great supporting cast, the fantastic performance from Oldman makes an indispensable contribution to the success of this film.  Not only with the makeup, but also the accents and the way to walk, Oldman has totally transformed
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Movie Review: The Post (Rating: 4/5)

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Directed by Steven Spielberg and played by award-winning cast including Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep , the film is about how the Washington Post has obtained the confidential study by the US government on the Vietnam War, and the struggle of whether or not to publish the information. The story itself is nothing out of the box since it is based on a pretty famous event in US history (i.e.: Pentagon Papers ), but the screenplay or the script is what makes this movie truly shines. First of all, the script moves the story slowly, so that without any knowledge of the related events in history, you can still fully understand the situation in that period of time, such as the frustration of the US government on fighting the Vietnam War, and the management issues of the Washington Post on its own survival.  Next, the script showed us the tangling relationships between the US administration personnel (including the First Family) and the media owners in those days, as well as more impo
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Development: Approaches on creating iOS apps

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Currently there are several different ways to create an iOS app, but there are two main approaches at the present time. First, create the app with Swift (the language created by Apple to replace Objective-C) and second, make the app using React Native (the JavaScript UI library created by Facebook). Each approach has it own pros and cons. This article is going to compare the two approaches, and hopefully to give you some ideas of what is involved in each approach before creating your first app. Using Swift Swift is easy to set up for development, you just launch Xcode on your Mac machine and you can start development right away (zero bootstrapping is required). Also, Swift supports Linux (even on Raspberry Pi ) and you can create web apps using Swift as well (using server-side frameworks such as Vapor). However, supporting Linux does not mean you can create a full-blown iOS app purely from Linux, because you need Xcode (i.e.: on your Mac) to compile the app and t
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Movie Review: Wonder (Rating: 5/5)

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The main storyline of Wonder (based on a novel with the same name) is about how a boy with facial differences fits into a mainstream primary school, and how his family members manage their own lives, while providing him all the support he requires. Not only the story itself is heartwarming, but also the way the story is told is just brilliant. Wonder is definitely one of the best movies in 2017.  The usual formula for this sort of film typically focuses only on the main character. Lucky for us,  this film took a very different approach, by letting us (the viewers) to see the perspectives from other characters, and the result makes the film both inspiring and refreshing. The main character is a fifth-grade boy (played by Jacob Tremblay ) who was born with a rare medical facial deformity. After years of being home schooled, his parents (played by Julia Roberts and Owen Wilson ) believe it is time for him to enter mainstream school. He also has an older sister (played by Izabe
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Development: Running Swift/Vapor in Codeanywhere

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Swift was introduced as a proprietary language by Apple in 2014, and it was open-sourced in 2015. Initially, Swift is used mainly for iOS development, but now developers are starting to use it for web development via the server-side Swift frameworks . One of the frameworks is called Vapor , which is the only one currently written purely in Swift. Codeanywhere is a cloud-based development environment, basically consisting of virtual machines (similar to DigitalOcean ) and a full-fledged code editor. Recently, Codeanywhere has started to provide a Swift container (like the Docker concept), for assisting developers to jumpstart Swift development. Unfortunately, the Swift release provided in the container is only version 2.2, while the Vapor framework requires version 3 or above. This article is going to show you how to upgrade the Swift release in the pre-defined container, download the Vapor framework/example, and launch the Vapor example in the Codeanywhere environment. Step 1
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