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Saturday, 23 May 2009
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It seems that the performance improvements in Ubuntu 9.04 paid off, especially with the new ext4 filesystem.
15 seconds from a cold start on my full installation - here is the bootchart to prove it:
Friday, 22 May 2009
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Troy vs. Not Troy

This should be self-explanatory. A few days ago, I took a random glimpse at peoples' status messages, and the dichotomy could not be ignored.
QN, at least your misfortune will be humorously immortalized.
Saturday, 09 May 2009
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Wikipedia Milestone: 3000 Edits

The 3000th edit, I admit, is not a particularly momentous one.
It should have come much earlier, but my Wikipedia involvement has continuously fallen due to real-life commitments...oh well...
Thursday, 30 April 2009
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APUSH Review Lecture Series
Recorded by QN
Edited by A.Ou- 21 April 2009 (Day #2, Robinson)
- 23 April 2009 (Day #4, Robinson)
- 27 April 2009 (Day #5, Dickey)
- 28 April 2009 (Day #6, Robinson)
- 29 April 2009 (Day #7, Dickey)

To be suitable for online distribution, raw recordings were edited as follows:
N.B. How to install SoX with MP3 support in GNU/Linux# Normalize volume (in addition, slow down tempo by 10% with Robinson for clarity)
sox -S $input tmp.wav pad 2 tempo 0.9 norm -3
# Encode at average bitrate of 32kbps
lame --abr 32 tmp.wav $output
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
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HowTo: SoX Installation
HowTo: Compiling SoX with read/write MP3 support in Ubuntu
SoX describes itself as the "Swiss Army knife of sound processing programs," a well-deserved title given the amount of functionality outlined in thesox(1)man page - one can say it's the command-line version of Audacity.
Due to patent issues and the typical legal mess, SoX binaries are distributed without MP3 support to avoid licensing fees (I would prefer an unencumered open format such as Ogg Vorbis, but MP3 remains too common to ignore). SoX can be given MP3 support, however, be recompiling it to use a third-party library such as LAME.
Instructions here are specific to Ubuntu (8.10+) but may be adapted for Debian or any other distro that uses APT.- Install packages required for the build environment (ensure that 'multiverse' and 'restricted' repositories are enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list).
Note that, in Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04, LAME development libraries are provided byliblame-devinstead oflibmp3lame-dev.sudo apt-get install build-essentials fakeroot libmp3lame-dev
sudo apt-get build-dep sox - Retrieve and unpack SoX sources into a clean directory.
mkdir sox
cd sox
apt-get source sox
dpkg-source -x sox_*.dsc
cd sox-*.*.* - Remove the '--disable-lame' compiler flag; either use sed to automate the task or manually edit sox-*.*.*/debian/rules with a text editor.
sed -i~ 's/--disable-lame//g' debian/rules - Build the package.
dpkg-buildpackage -b
You should be able to seechecking lame/lame.h usability... yes
echoed in the terminal, although it is recommended you redirect stdout to a log file because the messages will likely escape the scrollback buffer before there is a chance to pause and read.
checking lame/lame.h presence... yes
checking for lame/lame.h... yes
checking for lame_init in -lmp3lame... yes
<snip>
LAME MP3 writer................... yes - The build will provide all SoX-related packages, but only certain local ones are needed to replace the repository versions.
cd ..
sudo dpkg -i sox_*.deb libsox-fmt-mp3_*.deb
sox -hshould give something likeSUPPORTED FILE FORMATS: 8svx aif aifc aiff aiffc al alsa ao au auto avi avr caf cdda cdr cvs cvsd dat dvms fap ffmpeg flac fssd gsm hcom ima ircam la lpc lpc10 lu m3u m4a mat mat4 mat5 maud mp2 mp3 mp4 mpg nist nul null ogg oss ossdsp paf pls prc pvf raw s1 s2 s3 s4 sb sd2 sds sf sl smp snd sndfile sndt sou sph sw txw u1 u2 u3 u4 ub ul uw vms voc vorbis vox w64 wav wavpcm wmv wve xa xi
Support for extra formats can be obtained through thelibsox-fmt-allpackage.HowTo: Recompiling the latest SoX sources
I found myself desiring the "norm" effect, but, unfortunately, the feature was introduced in version 14.1.0, while the 8.10 repository is stuck at 14.0.1. In these cases, it becomes necessary to recompile the latest sources.- Download and unpack the latest stable SoX sources for GNU/Linux (currently 14.2.0). For expediency, wget is used here, but a regular web browser suffices.
wget http://superb-west.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/sox/sox-14.2.0.tar.gz
tar -xvzf sox-14.2.0.tar.gz - Set up the build environment.
sudo apt-get install build-essentials fakeroot checkinstall libmp3lame-dev
sudo apt-get build-dep sox
Note thatlibmp3lame-devis necessary for MP3 support through LAME, which is not automatically included among the SoX build dependencies due to MP3 patent/licensing issues.
For Ubuntu 7.10 and 8.04, LAME development headers and libraries are provided byliblame-devinstead. - Compiling involves the same standard procedure...
cd sox-14.2.0
./configure
make - Due to some strange linking situation in which shared libraries were not detected correctly, the links need to be repaired after installing or SoX will not run. (This took me a while to figure out.)
sudo make install
# Add /usr/local/lib to end of the include paths
sed -i~ '$s/$/& \/usr\/local\/lib/' /etc/ld.so.conf
sudo /sbin/ldconfig - For easier uninstallation, checkinstall can create a deb package so APT can keep track of the installed files.
sudo checkinstall
Note that SoX is produced as a single package, rather than as multiple packages by repository conventions.
- Install packages required for the build environment (ensure that 'multiverse' and 'restricted' repositories are enabled in /etc/apt/sources.list).
Monday, 27 April 2009
Sunday, 26 April 2009
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Elucidating Addie Bundren
For those of you in Mr. P's Language and Compositions class: if you find the mess of plain text from the email difficult to annotate, I have typeset the essay "Elucidating Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying" by Morna Flaum with LaTeX.
Download: PDF | LaTeX source
Saturday, 25 April 2009
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Teh Stoopid, it eviscerates
In observing wide range of opinions that people have expressed on the Internet, I have come to notice that one particular rule can be formulated from the chaos:As long as one is able to imagine the most hilarious/ridiculous/nonsensical position a person can possibly take on a certain issue, chances are that someone else on the Internet absolutely believes it.
I just had the random curiosity to search "pollution is good," and, a couple hyperlinks later, I found old NPR story about a think tank called the "Competitive Enterprise Institute" that says...wait for it...not only is global warming not real, raising atmospheric CO2 levels is actually a good thing.
What a catchy tagline for their ads: "They call it pollution. We call it life."
Since a little girl blowing on a dandelion is technically producing CO2, and little girls are (mostly) harmless, it must logically follow that CO2 is harmless.
It reminds me of a Youtube comment (where else?) I once read, arguing we should pump more greenhouse gases into the air because the Northwest is way too darn cold.
Interestingly, but not surprisingly, they have disallowed ratings on their Youtube videos. -
Earth Day
I watched the 10:30 PM showing of earth yesterday, which certainly had more eye-candy than the standard fare on television.
There were obvious problems with projecting anthropomorphic emotions onto animals (no, polar bears cannot "remember" the spirit of survival their ancestors had), and the film was admittedly sparse in actual scientific commentary. I'm not sure how one can speak about the diversity of life without some mention of the underlying evolutionary connections, but it was done.
Narrative flaws aside, however, earth was very visually awe-inspiring, especially with the unique timelapse of seasonal changes and panoramic landscape shots. It was also announced that Disneynature will be releasing another documentary that focuses on oceans next year.
Now, with our purchase of three tickets, there will be three more trees in this world...except that the deforestation of the Amazon is occurring at about six football fields per minute.
Friday, 24 April 2009
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Introducing JASon
I needed some way to convert diagram specifications to/from plain text in the CSUF database modeler; for simplicity, I settled on the JSON format. Yes, while I am aware that JSON cannot handle circular references (but I do have a solution), it is much easier to parse/generate than XML and neatly avoids the difficulty of defining an obscure binary.
I chose not to use an existing library for a couple of reasons:- Apparently, most Java libraries employ a DOM-like approach to serialize/deserialize Java objects. A full DOM tree is convenient, but for my purposes it would unnecessarily duplicate objects.
- One learns more by doing, and, in any case, I crave the amusement.
Some features:- Compliant with RFC 4627
- Validates input/output for well-formedness
- Parser/generator objects "recycle" themselves to minimize unnecessary object creation.
- If a DOM tree is desired, there is a DOM utility class that adapts the stream parser to produce one.
To get a local copy of the latest source code, runbzr branch lp:libjason(you need Bazaar for this).
For the Javadoc, runbzr branch lp:libjason/javadoc(viewing raw files is currently not possible at Launchpad). - Apparently, most Java libraries employ a DOM-like approach to serialize/deserialize Java objects. A full DOM tree is convenient, but for my purposes it would unnecessarily duplicate objects.
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