Older blog entries for aigeek (starting at number 8)

Found a dumb mistake in my feature extractor a couple weeks ago. I finally bit the bullet last week and fixed it, rescaned all my data (100GB!), and retrained my classifiers. Got a 10% boost in accuracy, so it's not only more correct, but useful too, which is a nice bonus. My simple linear network can distinguish between techno and pop music with 91% accuracy, and it's only using spectral features. This is going to rock once I add tempo, beat strength, and rhythm signatures. I'm in a feature freeze until I submit the thesis though. Must... document...!

I needed a break from thesis writing, so I spent a few minutes and added something from my project back into my XMMS spectrum analyzer. Oooh. Pretty entropy. (I released it too, so everyone can play.)

Wow. Last night, someone showed me a short New Scientist blurb about automatic music classification (my thesis topic), and today it's all over slashdot. If that had happened six months ago, I could have gotten other people contributing code to my thesis. I probably would have had an easier time keeping my motivation up too. Working alone gets old after a few months.

The weirdest part though is seeing other people say some of the things I've been spouting for years, mostly about all the great applications for this. I kept thinking, "Yes! Yes! Yes! Now help me write it!"

I'd been planning to start an open project on music analysis after I finished here. I have to spend the next month writing up my results, but I can't waste all that good publicity, so I created a SourceForge project today, project name "vole". Picking a name was hard until I stopped trying to make it relevant. I also quickly put up some links to music analysis research in case anyone is actually interested.

tladuca wrote:

Few people take that step to get there heads around some large and complex project and help contribute to projects that are much more valuable to the community, [..] I really wish we each had a mechanism where other Advogato users could reply to our diary entries and have them show up.

Your path is clear. :-)

I agree with that feature wish though. I don't think diaries and articles are fundamentally different. I think it would be nice if I could see everything written by a certain person, regardless of the forum, and for each message, see the context and surf the threads. But I'm too busy to do anything about it right now.

In regards to your larger point, I think there are reasons to work on small independent projects that few people will use.

• It's easier to work on tiny projects. There's no paradigm to inherit, no code to read, and no maintainer to convince.
• Bad code doesn't affect anyone else.
• It's fun to own a project.

There are points in favor of working on more popular packages too.

• More people will benefit from your work.
• More people will discuss your ideas with you.
• More people will discuss your code with you.
• More people will contribute to the software you use.
• More poeple will have heard of you and might certify you on Advogato. ;-)
• You'll get more teamwork experience.
• Working in a team is fun.
• You might learn from the code you have to read.
• You might learn from the architecture you have to conform to.

In the past, I've done lots of my own independent projects, mostly because I haven't been aware of existing things that were close enough to what I wanted. I often submit small patches to other people's projects, but doing something major on someone else's project has a political overhead and I don't usually take the time to deal with it. It would probably be good for me though. Maybe I'll make time once I'm working again. (Being a grad student is far more time consuming than being an employee.)

I rewrote the logging proxy for autojot as a FilterProxy module. Now it's more reliable and easier to configure, but is also more trouble to install since you have to install FilterProxy first. Oh, well. I did at least write a script to install my filter module into FilterProxy.

Still to do before a proper release: move all settings out of the scripts and into a config file, document document document.

tladuca wrote:

Few people take that step to get there heads around some large and complex project and help contribute to projects that are much more valuable to the community, [..] I really wish we each had a mechanism where other Advogato users could reply to our diary entries and have them show up.

Your path is clear. :-)

I agree with that feature wish though. I don't think diaries and articles are fundamentally different. I think it would be nice if I could see everything written by a certain person, regardless of the forum, and for each message, see the context and surf the threads. But I'm too busy to do anything about it right now.

In regards to your larger point, I think there are reasons to work on small independent projects that few people will use.

• It's easier to work on tiny projects. There's no paradigm to inherit, no code to read, and no maintainer to convince.
• Bad code doesn't affect anyone else.
• It's fun to own a project.

There are points in favor of working on more popular packages too.

• More people will benefit from your work.
• More people will discuss your ideas with you.
• More people will discuss your code with you.
• More people will contribute to the software you use.
• More poeple will have heard of you and might certify you on Advogato. ;-)
• You'll get more teamwork experience.
• Working in a team is fun.
• You might learn from the code you have to read.
• You might learn from the architecture you have to conform to.

In the past, I've done lots of my own independent projects, mostly because I haven't been aware of existing things that were close enough to what I wanted. I often submit small patches to other people's projects, but doing something major on someone else's project has a political overhead and I don't usually take the time to deal with it. It would probably be good for me though. Maybe I'll make time once I'm working again. (Being a grad student is far more time consuming than being an employee.)

dmerrill wonders, "Isn't the concept of meeting as a physical occurrence an anachronism?"

I don't think it is. A face-to-face meeting is extremely high bandwidth. Text and audio can't compete. Video conferencing is closer, but it's still rare. Online interaction is nice, but it's not as rich as the real thing.

I've released the disgusting code for autojot. It's far from ready for a real release, but I won't have time to work on it for another few months and I thought someone might like to play with it.

Hi. I'm here. It occurs to me that if I don't write in my diary, no one will notice my arrival. Though I'd heard of this place previously through other grapevines, I didn't check it out until the existence of the Salon article reminded me, so I'm technically part of the Salonslaught. But I should probably be here anyway.

I already maintain a journal on my own site. It would be convenient for me to post future journal entries in both places, but is that good for building community? It makes it easier for people to get to know me, but it lacks the exclusivity a community requires and doesn't encourage cross-diary dialog.