It seems that youngsters a third of my age seem to be able to memorise this and type it in without thinking, but I need this put somewhere my lazy neurons can find it.
vlc -vvv "input.flv" --no-sout-video --play-and-exit --sout="#transcode{acodec=mp3,ab=320,channels=2}:std{access=file,mux=raw,dst="output.mp3}"
...and don't forget to double-check that VLC has write permission for the target directory (it is very cautious). Yes yes yes, should be Linux, should be ogg etc. etc. but sometimes my hands are tied.
I am glad to see that Pedro is also having fun with R. There are, however, times when it drives me crazy. For example, carrying out simple linear regression, then using the result to predict a value. Note that in the code below I have replaced my preferred assignment operator (less_than + hyphen) with Pascal's := because Advogato doesn't like stray angle brackets, so rewrite it if you want to run the code;
# Let's create some x and y values
xlist := c(1:5);
ylist := c(0.9, 2.1, 3.2, 4.3, 5.1);
# Now simple linear regression
regobject := lm(ylist ~ xlist, data=data.frame(cbind(xlist, ylist)));
If I look at the contents of regobject then all is well. However, now for the prediction. In a sane world this should be as simple as;
predict(regobject, newdata=testvalue);
Where testvalue has the x-value to be used in the prediction. Unfortunately R fails worse than silently as it just provides the predicted values for everything in xlist. Okay, maybe I need to coerce the value into a data frame.
predict(regobject, newdata=data.frame(testvalue));
Nope. It needs a data frame with a column with the same name as that used to generate the regression object. I have not seen that written explicitly in any book or help file. Thankfully a few other folk have ranted about this so there are explanations out there.
predict(regobject, newdata=data.frame(xlist=testvalue));
Woohoo! So now,
predict(regobject, newdata=data.frame(xlist=2.5));
gives me the predicted y-value for x=2.5 (y=2.59). My guess is that being an R programmer is now so lucrative that documentation is written in an obscure (but factually correct) manner deliberately. Prepare for this blog entry to receive a takedown notice :-)
...and talking of Linux on odd platforms, my Ultra 5 lives again, and now with Debian squeeze. Getting the NVRAM back to a working state involved a big oops on my part, that required me to do a [STOP]-[N] to clear everything and start over. I also tried to use the serial console for the first time and got nowhere, but then I RTFM and found that the 25-pin port has priority and the 9-pin port doesn't wake up until the system gets further along in the boot process. With that in mind I'll dig out my old Laplink cable sometime and see if I can get the console to work.
As a follow-up to my previous entries on books, I was both amused and horrified when I borrowed a copy of one of the new omnibus editions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (my nearly three-decades old copies of the original books have all been "borrowed" by my nephews) and found that they've made some odd changes. One was to remove references to Biros and replace them with ballpoints. That destroys one of the local memes from my undergraduate days, when we referred to all writing implements as "biroids" (except when they were penciloids). The other noticeable change is that the Rory award is no longer for "the most gratuitous use of the word F**k in a serious screenplay", but instead links in a piece from the radio series on the meaning of Belgium. Strange people, these Americans...
To try and avoid becoming too jaded I am also reading Marilynne Robinson's When I Was a Child I Read Books which is wonderful. Robinson loves Walt Whitman and quotes him at length in the introduction, but I really like her own words:
"To identify sacred mystery with every individual experience, every life, giving the word its largest sense, is to arrive at democracy as an ideal, and to accept the difficult obligation to honor others and oneself with something approaching due reverence. It is a vision that is wholly religious though by no means sectarian, wholly realist in acknowledging the great truth of the centrality of human consciousness, wholly open in that it anticipates and welcomes the disruption of present values in the course of finding truer ones."
Tell it, Marilynne! Tell it!
Last week, I was watching a Public Service Broadcast warning us to be ready for earthhquakes and using the message that the day before the last big quake was just another day. They should use the same approach for encouraging backup strategies. I had been backing up our home's Windows box in a half-hearted way and naturally it died before I was finished (wouldn't start one evening). This was the first time for my partner to see me disemboweling something like that, and she was amused when I hauled out the dead power supply, trailing cables like entrails. Off to the local branch of my favourite store (only been there once since it opened) and managed to get one on sale. The sales person was weirdly evocative of Marigold Farmer (although I suppose working in public would be out of character for her). After a couple of hours of cleaning (six years' of dust) and reassembling we now have a system that is considerably quieter than before. ...and yes, I'll finish the backup, tomorrow maybe...
All I can do each day is to wait until I leave the horror behind (yay Vim!).
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