everything samwyse knows / uncategorized

One of the Audacity use cases lists functions that would be useful when transcribing recordings.  I’ve investigated what is required to implement these features, and while it’s more complicated than I might have hoped, it doesn’t appear to be insurmountable.  Looping play repeats the initially selected section until stopped; however the selected region can be changed without affecting the looping region.  Similarly, it seems apparent that dynamic changes to the looping region should not change the current selection.  Therefore, none of the current “change selection” code can be re-used. (more…)

Normally, my wife cooks all of the meals in our household, but a couple of times a month she takes some or all of the kids and spends a few days visiting her parents.  At those times, I’m able to release my inner chef and try cooking something that I’ve never made before.  So it shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that, a while back, I decided to try my hand at making hummus.  I bought a can of chick-peas, tossed it into the back of the pantry, and forgot about it until tonight. (more…)

Over at Trevors Trinkets, there’s an interesting bit about chording keyboards that made the front page at Slashdot. Chording keyboards are nothing new (Douglas Engelbart invented one for use with his other invention), but Trevor seems to have come up with the idea independently. Or at least he has some fresh twists on the idea. (more…)

I just discovered Rob Weir’s blog and have been reading some of his past posts. One thing that has occurred to me is an old annoyance with HTML, especially from ten years ago or so. HTML never standardized a way to implement work-arounds for new elements. (more…)

On Christmas Day, 2006, the following intro to a fantasy story popped
into my head.  Due to procrastination, it is only now being put down in
words, er, electrons.

In the Elder Days, before the Time of Legends, we were all
brutes.  Only the Bear Clan has stories from that time and they are
ill-formed tales, possessing neither Heros nor Deeds.  They tell of a world overrun by goblins, and of a light from the heavens that drove them away.

The story that may someday follow would be a “Watership Down” sort of thing; not an animal fable (although I may adapt some fables as interstitial and/or sidebar material) but a heroic fantasy.  The goblins, BTW, are humans, who for reasons unknown have (mostly) left the world of the story, leaving the animals to re-populate the forests and streams.

I’ve also been reading Blogging the Bible at Slate Magazine.  I’ve mostly been skimming, but it has a lot of good quotes that could inspire sections of my story.  The hardest thing about writing a story about a pre-industrial society is getting into the mind-set; I really need to read lots of stories written in those times.

On Christmas Day, 2006, the following intro to a fantasy story popped
into my head.  Due to procrastination, it is only now being put down in
words, er, electrons.

In the Elder Days, before the Time of Legends, we were all
brutes.  Only the Bear Clan has stories from that time and they are
ill-formed tales, possessing neither Heros nor Deeds.  They tell of a world overrun by goblins, and of a light from the heavens that drove them away.

The story that may someday follow would be a “Watership Down” sort of thing; not an animal fable (although I may adapt some fables as interstitial and/or sidebar material) but a heroic fantasy.  Of course, that means that I need a quest of some sort, which I haven’t thought of yet.  Perhaps in another dream…

The goblins, BTW, are humans, who for reasons unknown have (mostly) left the world of the story, leaving the animals to re-populate the forests and streams.

On Christmas Day, 2006, the following intro to a fantasy story popped
into my head. Due to procrastination, it is only now being put down in
words, er, electrons.

In the Elder Days, before the Time of Legends, we were all
brutes. Only the Bear Clan has stories from that time and they are
ill-formed tales, possessing neither Heros nor Deeds. They tell of a world overrun by goblins, and of a light from the heavens that drove them away.

(more…)

I would like to point out one way that Apple could control the hardware of innumerable clone manufacturers: Use a virtual machine. This would fit with Cringley’s comparison to something similar to Boot Camp. The user would boot a simple VM hypervisor that provides a consistent architecture, and then boot OS X on top of that. This would somewhat reduce the performace of the computer, but I don’t see that as being a bad thing, from Apple’s point of view. Instead, Apple gets a way for people to try out OS X on hardware that they already own, along with a reason to buy Apple’s hardware if they like what they see; they only need to adjust the performance of the VM so that Apple’s hardware provides a better performance-cost ratio running OS-X natively than anyone else’s hardware running the hypervisor.

This is interesting. I sent a package (part return) to Dell via DHL. The tracking number is 18923687624. If you go to their tracking page and enter that number, you’ll see that it is “With delivery courier” with “Est. Delivery Date: 1/3/2006″. I tried calling DHL on the 4th, and was told that since they get so many packages, things sometimes get backed up at Dell. Well, now it’s the morning of the 5th, and it’s still apparently on a truck somewhere.

Of course, what I really think happened is that it forgot to get scanned when it was delivered. Still, I wonder how long it will remain in this state before someone notices.

Update:  On January 6th, the package tracker finally started showing that my package had arrived on the 3rd.  I find it interesting that it took three days to get that information into the system.

Democracy, our least bad system of government, is on its way out. Can we invent a better new system? Perhaps. But today’s political correctness does not allow one to say “There may be a political system which is better than Democracy”. The result of this prohibition will be an inevitable return to some kind of totalitarian rule.

read more | digg story

The WSJ has an op-ed about why Muslims and non-Muslims must unite to defeat the Wahhabi ideology. It leads off with “News organizations report that Osama bin Laden has obtained a religious edict from a misguided Saudi cleric, justifying the use of nuclear weapons against America and the infliction of mass casualties.” Now doesn’t that just make my whole day.
read more | digg story