BurnPC.com

I’m experimenting with this software to see if it can help me focus better while working on the computer. http://gnaural.sourceforge.net/

Weird stuff, not so exciting for listening.

I’ve recently become very interested in Cloud Computing with things like Google AppEngine, Amazon EC2, and even Salesforce. I think there are some very compelling benefits to running your apps in The Cloud. All the hardware stuff that software developers should not need to worry about (although many of us do because we LIKE hardware), such as performance, scalability, redundancy, and the like, are addressed by letting someone else handle those pieces.

How is this different from say, hosting your servers at a data center with super bandwidth, monster generators, multiple OC192 hookups from different providers? [Read more →]

Earlier I posted how youtube changed how they handled mp4 files, which resulted in my video not being classified as High Quality. When Youtube classified the video differently, they made it have a horribly low framerate which was very noticable. After some tinkering around, I found that by simply re-encoding the video at the same resolution and framerate with ffmpeg youtube sees it as High Quality after I upload it. ffmpeg is doing something, but I have no idea what…

ffmpeg Instructions for Linux (I’m assuming you have installed ffmpeg already):

ffmpeg -r 30 -sameq -ar 44100 -ab 128 -i originalFile.mp4 -y outputFile.mp4

ffmpeg Instructions for Windows:

Sorry… no instructions at this time. I would like to provide them and may update this when I have a chance.

This is Part 1 of a 2 Part Series. Part 2 will focus on semantic web, faceted navigation, maybe some graph theory. I’m not there yet.

The purpose of this article is to discuss dealing with the practically infinite amount of information that is now available to us via the internet. Information is becoming increasingly distracting and I think can lead to serious impact especially on areas of research where true focus is needed.

Intro

If I can sit on a couch with my phone / PDA / laptop and find the answer to Jeopardy questions fast enough, what value is there in knowing an obscure date or fact? Absolutely none. Facts on their own are simply trivia. I think everyone has agreed with this for a long time. Rote-memory teaching techniques may be good if your goal is to know the names of all the bones in the human body. And granted, their are certain vocabularies which must be learned in order to understand fields of work. Bones of the body are part of the vocabulary of doctors / biologists and the like. But yet again, knowing an individual word’s definition may not have much value. So where does the value begin?

Concepts are Key

Our ability as humans to understand and create relationships between the pieces of information provides for an additional level of understanding. Communicating concepts and relationships via a complex language allows us to collaborate and grow those ideas, to build on the work of others.

So what happens now when in the age of google, flickr, twitter, wikipedia, email, calendars alerting you to do crap… an age where we are constantly bombarded with ‘trivia’… how do we work with such large volumes of data? [Read more →]

One of the great things about linux is that everything is modular. In the case of window managers, Compiz Fusion is really coming along to be pretty freaking awesome if you have the computer to handle it. This video pretty much sums up how awesome it is:

Unfortunately, it looks like YouTube has changed the way they process .mp4 videos. At least for the type of mp4 files created by my nokia phone (Nokia N95). The videos now appear more jerky (less frames per second / FPS?), and there is no longer a HQ option. My phone takes great videos and this has been a nice way to share them with family. I may have to look for an alternative service, or convert and host them myself. Google where are you? I hope this gets changed, as it is a move backwards for me. This seems to have happened at the time when they started promoting HD content (720p). Oh well… Here are 2 examples of my videos. I’m sure you can tell the difference. They were both taken with the same phone, same application and everything. I transferred the jerky one to my PC to verify and it looks nice and smooth there.

Video 1: Nice quality, even better if you select HQ

Video 2: Jerky, no HQ option

When my computer blew up, I built out an Ubuntu Hardy box for the meantime. I’m thinking this is what I’ll go with when I rebuild the computer when the warranteed parts come in. I just installed Picasa 3 beta and so far it seems every bit as feature-rich as the Windows version. If you want to install it and you’re using a debian-based system (apt-get) then I recommend that you install from google’s beta repository. It’s easy!

edit /etc/apt/sources.list and add the repository listed here. You’ll then need to install google’s pgp sigining key. use wget to retrieve it. OK so I was lame with the no-check thing, but I’m not worried.

wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/linux/linux_signing_key.pub --no-check-certificate

sudo apt-key add linux_signing_key.pub

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install picasa

Done!

picasa > /dev/null &

It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion,
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.

Dune