Older blog entries for nutella (starting at number 264)

Well that makes a change
Everything centred is a little better than everything in bold.
GAR!

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 :-)

Pedro, I was just reading the same thing. I have to admit I've never run Linux on my 80386/33 (now confined to my mother's attic) but started with Slackware and a 1.0 kernel on my 486 (which now runs a bastard combination of Slackware 3.foo and RHL5.2/Apollo - on the rare occasions I switch it on). It did seem a little sad to lose one architecture, but then I read the details and could see how big a gap there was between the capabilities of the 386 and 486.

...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.

Assault & battery
A silly number of my Advogato entries concern me replacing CMOS batteries. This might be because I hang on to my boxen for so long. The latest casualty is my Sun Ultra 5, as I wanted to have another go at getting X to work with my LCD monitor. That computer is not connected to the internet and hasn't been upgraded since woody. It also hadn't been switched on since I moved house. Last night I decided to try the upgrade (why yes, my wife is out of town at the moment - how did you guess?) and after [STOP]-[A] I was greeted with frightening error messages and a claim that the MAC address was now FF:FF:FF:FF:FF:FF and IDPROM is now invalid. I pulled the cover off and played Hunt-the-Battery for a short while before giving up and RTFM. The battery is embedded in a bigarse chip (an ST M48T59Y-70PC1U), along with the crystal. Yes, you can get replacements, but they are a little spendy. I was thus gratified to see that other, budget-conscious folk have found other ways to fix it. I'm not sure my skills are up to the level of carving out the old battery, but wiring a new one in parallel seems doable. Then, of course, I'll have to restore everything. Amazingly, since my Ultra 5 journey has been so interesting, I actually kept notes about all the key settings. We'll see how this goes.

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...

Two Books
In keeping with current events I am reading HST's Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. This is made extra poignant by the death of George McGovern, who features heavily in the book.

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!

22 Oct 2012 (updated 23 Oct 2012 at 01:22 UTC) »
Wow!
IT took my work computer away, and it came back with a downgrade to Office 2003. This was unlikely due to my low-grade complaining and more due to the fact that 2007's handling of Word styles isn't compatible with our document templates used for regulatory filing. IT had also used me as a guinea-pig for some kind of migration tool (it looked like Laplink from the 1990s) and it broke several programs very badly (couldn't be uninstalled, no way to reinstall over the top) so they needed several iterations to get it right. Who know what tomorrow will bring. Why can't there be an apt tool for everything in life?

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...

Make it stop!
So they "refreshed" my work computer and they've given me Office 2007 (no choice in the matter). Consequently productivity has dropped considerably. I will not waste time rehashing everyone's complaints about the ribbon, but I now understand what all the fuss is about. The "quick" bar is very limited in scope so you can't recreate the fast toolbars of previous Office versions. For mouse users, everything is about two clicks further away than it used to be. I am amused that there's a roaring trade in commercial add-ons that can allow you to mimic older versions of Office. Minimum price is ~$20. I've not seen anything free.

All I can do each day is to wait until I leave the horror behind (yay Vim!).

I admit it. Other people influence my buying decisions too.
I was watching with quiet amusement the folk prebuying their new iPhones sight-unseen, just because. Then I realised that any disdain was somewhat hypocritical on my part as I am not immune from being influenced by others. I read Cliff Stoll's Scientific American article on the history of slide rules, and watched him using his during his TED talk. Now I have a Faber-Castell 2/83N, like all the cool kids. Dr. Stoll described it as "beautiful", and indeed it is, although my decades old Boots RingPlan isn't that ugly (but that one is rather worn - partly from ruler-to-rulert combat) (the Boots' model I own was made in Germany so it may have actually come from the same factory as my 2/83N). I purchased my new old slide rule direct from Germany (they seem used to people from abroad asking about them) and the price was modest, considering they don't make them any more, and they kindly included a photocopy of the English version of the manual, as well as the original German. I see the same model on eBay and other sites for considerably higher prices, so some enterprising person could start an import business to keep people like me happy.

When preparing for my O'-Levels, the school I attended taught us with mathematical tables, rather than slide rules. I learned about the latter from a friend who attended the our rival school, as there they took the other path. I have more fondness for my slide rule, which was "for fun", than my trusty book of log tables which I used nearly every day. Yes, we did have electronic calculators available, but those were forbidden during those exams. In later tests the calculators were permitted but, thanks to them using vacuum fluorescent displays, you had to have a pocket full of spare batteries just in case.

Since I was paying the shipping for the must-have 2/83N I also grabbed a "Darmstadt" slide rule "für Maschinen- und Elektro-Ingenieure", partly because it looked like an upgraded version of old-faithful Boots, but mainly because of the awesome Addiator on the back. Now, who's the coolest!

Yay! Pi in the sky!
On my way to the cafeteria today I ran in to a group of colleagues staring upwards. After being convinced it wasn't just spontaneous street theatre I realised it was for this event (more realistic picture here) (I love the description of "aircraft equipped with dot-matrix technology"). It provoked childlike levels of excitement. Those who missed it seemed sorely disappointed.

Not much else worthy of note at the moment. I don't have much time to read or watch anything fun. The main thing on my To Do list is to noot my Nook Color (a gift from my wife) as the out-of-box environment is pretty minimal (no clock, calculator, text editor etc.).

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