Christopher Roach

Biography

Christopher Roach recently graduated with a master's in computer science and currently works in Florida as a software engineer at a government communications corporation. He switched over to the Mac about two years ago and hasn't looked back since (though he still tends to have an affair with Linux every once in a while).

Articles

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Building Decision Trees in Python
Publish Date: Feb. 9, 2006Python is a good language for machine learning--it's easy to express powerful algorithms maintainably, and it's flexible to experiment with new approaches. Christopher Roach demonstrates the use and implementation of decision trees, a fundamental feature of datamining, that can help you find trends in your data. Spymac's Wheel vs. Dot Mac for Easy Web Services
Publish Date: Feb. 8, 2005For Mac users who like a convenient package of web services, two major players have emerged -- Apple's .Mac and Spymac's Wheel. Christopher Roach takes both services for a spin and reports on the strengths and weaknesses of each offering. An Introduction to RubyCocoa, Part 2
Publish Date: Oct. 12, 2004In Part 1 of this two-part series, Christopher Roach provided some background and helped you get started with RubyCocoa programming. In today's conclusion he gets into the actual code ... and if you're following along, you'll end up with a functioning application. An Introduction to RubyCocoa, Part 1
Publish Date: Oct. 5, 2004RubyCocoa is a framework that provides a bridge between the Ruby programming language and the Cocoa framework. In this tutorial, Christopher Roach shows you how to use this tool by walking you through the steps for creating a simple GUI for the Unix tar program. Ruby/Tk Primer, Part 3
Publish Date: Jul. 27, 2004In Part 2 of this series, Chris Roach spent some time with the Tk library. Now in this final installment, he pulls together all of the pieces so you can finish your demo application. Ruby/Tk Primer, Part 2
Publish Date: Jul. 23, 2004In part one of this series, Chris Roach introduced you to programming basics in Ruby, and in the process, created the back end for the GUI we're working on. Here, he spends some time with the Tk library. Ruby/Tk Primer: Creating a cron GUI Interface with Ruby/Tk
Publish Date: Jun. 25, 2004In this first installment of a three-part series, Chris Roach shows you how to use Ruby and Tk on Mac OS X. This tutorial creates a program that will act as a GUI-based front end to the cron daemon.

Blog

An Addendum to "Building Decision Trees in Python"

June 13 2007

About a year ago I started a series of articles for O’Reilly on Artificial Intelligence topics with Python. The first of these articles was on decision trees and their uses in data mining and was rather well received. However, after getting off to a great start, my real life took… read more