Posts are going to come fast and furious

Posts are going to come fast and furious whenever I ruminate.  When do I ruminate? Not often in front of a computer. But, here I am.

Syndicated 2013-06-05 05:03:19 from Assignments and Associations

Sigil

Sigil sigil – The EPUB Editor EPUB. For when you need to read it on your own terms.  This is an editor for writing EPUB documents for use with the Nook or other e-Readers.

Syndicated 2013-06-05 04:50:30 from Assignments and Associations

The Ring.

Does it control time? Nay, only you can control time.

Syndicated 2013-06-05 04:07:47 from Assignments and Associations

Bacon.js

Bacon.js A functional reactive programming framework for web-browsers. Turns your event spaghetti into clean and declarative feng shui bacon, by switching from imperative to functional. It’s like replacing nested for-loops with functional programming concepts like map and filter.

Syndicated 2013-06-05 03:56:02 from Assignments and Associations

Haskell Challenges You.

Chances are, if it isn’t compiling in Haskell, you aren’t solving the problem you think you are. The strong-type system of Haskell shouldn’t be looked upon as a burden on the programmer, but instead a liberation from iterative write-run-test thrashing. If your types are too complicated to understand, your abstractions may not be fully baked. […]

Syndicated 2013-06-05 01:11:49 from Assignments and Associations

Reboot.

Too much old. Much to be new. Renewing this medium with a new mission. Perhaps you’ll join for this ride and subscribe.

Syndicated 2013-06-04 23:54:15 from Assignments and Associations

Five Rules For Using Google Docs for Outlining

Five Rules For Using Google Docs for Outlining

How to use Google Docs for Rapid Thought Capture.

Everyone is always wishing for the perfect outlining tool. There isn’t one and everyone’s preferences (insane, petty, or whatever) drives the launch and design of thousands of outliner applications. But a cloud-based word processor can be abused in just such a way to make a decent outliner if you restrict your use of its features instead of relying on the bells and whistles of an application. If you like Markdown, look at this as being the in-between of WYSIWYG and just using plain-text.

Don’t waste your time making outlines and fiddling with styles while you’re thinking and brainstorming with these simple rules.

Rule #1: Never touch the mouse.

You see that thing to the side of your keyboard? It’s poison. Don’t touch it.

Just about everything you need to do for functional outlining can be done with your keyboard. If you need to do something with your mouse, chances are, you’re about to commit a thinking error involving styling your text. Change a font? Are you kidding? What are you doing? Does that font make your thought more pertinent? Of course not! Concentrate on your text first, and you’ll get your thinking done in less time.

You’ll be learning various keyboard shortcuts to apply when you need some semantic oomph, but the first one you’re not going to learn is TAB. Like this paragraph? You know how you get a paragraph? You hit enter, twice. Done.

If you think you can’t navigate your text without the mouse, well, you’re wrong. The keyboard has HOME, END, CURSOR and modifiers like CONTROL and SHIFT that do magical things with the cursor and your text. Learn them.

Rule #2: Never indent your text.

Don’t touch your TAB key. Indenting your text is just a different way of styling it. Not even for quotations.

Oh, I know, outlines are all about indenting. Screw it.  Once you fall into the text-indenting trap, you’ll fight with indents when and wherever you move your text around in your outline. You have a quotation? Well, use a fine keyboard invention called “quotation marks.” For example:

“Man, I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who’ve ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

Respect your quotation marks. Use paragraphs. Stop arranging deck chairs fighting with indents when you can be writing your thoughts.

Rule #3: Write your headings first.

Fill in your thoughts after you use the headings to define their containers.

In the Google Docs hosted version of this document the table of contents is built exactly from the headings and provides you an excellent summary of what your document is about. Hey, look, you can even click on them to navigate inside your document.

Control-Alt-1 is Heading 1

Control-Alt-2 is Heading 2

Control-Alt-3 is Heading 3

(ARE YOU SEEING THE PATTERN?)

Control-Alt-6 is Heading 6.

You get six different sizes of headings. If you’re going deeper than that and require a smaller, 7th heading, you’re confused and you’re not organizing your material effectively to summarize your content.

Rule #4: Judiciously use use italics and bold.

There are a couple things you can do with text that is stylish from the keyboard. Don’t go crazy with it and reserve their use for selected tasks.

Reserve italics for emphasis and summary. Use bold for popping concepts out inside of your text when they’re not a needed heading. Don’t bother combining them or you’ll find yourself fighting with whether you intended to have bold italics or not and wondering if you mean to emphasis or describe at the same time. Maybe you can handle that, but in general don’t overload text like this if you can help it, it’s less work and simplifies writing.

Rule #5: Limit your blocks of text to what fits on your screen.

Where the headings are labeling, some selective italicized text summarizes, your textual meat should fit on screen.

You’re outlining, not writing a novel. Don’t write a novel between your headings. Make your point succinct.

The Worst Part of This Exercise

Is using the HTML exporter from Google Docs, which fantastically avoids using the HTML elements of I and B (or EM and STRONG) for representing italic and bold text. So if you’re going to live with the quirks of Google Docs, you should plan to stay within Google Docs.

Now, if only Evernote and WordPress had Control-Alt-# shortcuts for headings…

Filed under: Cloud Dependency

Syndicated 2012-10-11 16:24:27 from sj4nz

Making Podcasts Sanely Seekable for Car Audio MP3 Devices

When it comes down to my car’s MP3 player, seeking is the most painful capability—it’s limited to 2x-speed, which is disasterous for seeking to the 45m point of a podcast that’s 90m long. Yes, it’s terrible.

mp3splt to the rescue

If you could roughly split an MP3 into ten-tracks wherever there’s enough silence, you could divide each podcast into ten “rough” chapters. It turns out that there’s a nice CLI utility for doing this, called mp3splt. Here is how I invoke it with a shell function:

function podsplt() 
{               
   mp3splt -s -p nt=10,th=-50 "$1" \
   -d `basename "$1" .mp3`
}

This explodes the MP3 into ten tracks in its own directory, ready to go on any USB or disc media your MP3 player accepts. If you need to change the number of “chapters”, adjust the nt=10 parameter, e.g. nt=15 if you want 15-tracks. If the audio is noisy, raise the silence “floor” with the th=-50 paramter, e.g. th=-40.

Get mp3splt from http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net

Filed under: Audio, Podcasts, Software, Technology

Syndicated 2012-10-05 13:45:27 from sj4nz

Opus: A New Standard Codec for Audio

This is right out of left-field and looks to re-invigorate streaming audio applications.  What would you do with a 255 channel stream? To me that sounds like a potentially awesome future application of a remote mixing board or a live-broadcasting bonaza of choice for the harried producer or social streaming audio media. You could have an entire network blasted down to a consumer’s tuner and they could change channels without suffering audio drop-outs due to buffering.

Opus Interactive Audio Codec

Overview

Opus is a totally open, royalty-free, highly versatile audio codec. Opus is unmatched for interactive speech and music transmission over the Internet, but also intended for storage and streaming applications. It is standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) as RFC 6716 which incorporated technology from Skype’s SILK codec and Xiph.Org’s CELT codec.

Technology

Opus can handle a wide range of audio applications, including Voice over IP, videoconferencing, in-game chat, and even remote live music performances. It can scale from low bit-rate narrowband speech to very high quality stereo music. Supported features are:

• Bit-rates from 6 kb/s to 510 kb/s
• Sampling rates from 8 kHz (narrowband) to 48 kHz (fullband)
• Frame sizes from 2.5 ms to 60 ms
• Support for both constant bit-rate (CBR) and variable bit-rate (VBR)
• Audio bandwidth from narrowband to full-band
• Support for speech and music
• Support for mono and stereo
• Support for up to 255 channels (multistream frames)
• Dynamically adjustable bitrate, audio bandwidth, and frame size
• Good loss robustness and packet loss concealment (PLC)
• Floating point and fixed-point implementation

You can read the full specification, including the reference implementation, in RFC 6716. An up-to-date implementation of the Opus standard is also available from the downloads page.

Filed under: Audio, Technology Tagged: Audio codec, Opus, Streaming media

Syndicated 2012-09-12 02:28:55 from sj4nz

Don’t Be Under the Cloud (Part Ⅰ)

Using TaskWarrior for Project Management

I know they’re sexy. They’re beautiful. They’re everywhere: To-do list and project managers like Asana, Behance’s ActionMethod and Nirvana. [You can go on forever listing these, they're easy to make, easy to market and extremely competitive.]  If they’re free, eventually you’ll run into their limitations. I especially enjoyed PivotalTracker, but they since changed their business model and it was no longer useful to me (on my budget).  Lessons learned: Free + Online always means you’re going to be vulnerable to Internet, weather, or market conditions. Get off the cloud whenever it makes sense.

Enter TaskWarrior.

I’ve always been a CLI-person, since learning UNIX back in the good ole’ days in the late ’80s.  There are just some things that are more reliable when you’re not fighting the latest GUI fashion of the day, whether it be in your web browser or your operating system.  I needed a CLI-task/project management system, something that wouldn’t require a web server to install or web browser to display. TaskWarrior (which I’ll abbreviate TW) fills that bill and I don’t have to be nagged to “upgrade” when I exceed a number of tasks or projects. I won’t regurgitate how you can use it here when there’s a very short 30-Second Tutorial and a Longer Tutorial already there to use. What I do want you to know about are the reporting features.

Shaving Milliseconds

Add:

alias tw=task

to your shell configuration and you’ll save a couple of keystrokes invoking TW.  You could use TW’s built-in “shell” command but since TW may-or-may-not have GNU Readline support built-in, it’s easer to edit and run from the shell. If you don’t make this alias, mentally replace tw with task in all of my following examples.

The Default Report and Other Reports

The default report is what is shown when you simply run tw– you’ll get a list of tasks ID, Project, Priority, Due-Date, Age, Active-Tasks, Urgency (a unique TW feature) and Description. This report is good enough to clue you into what you should be working on next and will highlight what you’re actively working on if you have started it. 

Urgency

Urgency is TW’s way of weighting tasks so they bubble up to the top of your heap. Tasks not assigned to projects aren’t as urgent as tasks that are and tasks with closer due-dates are more urgent than tasks without due-dates, and so on.  If you really want to nuance (or waste your time) urgency, you can also set priorities on your tasks.  I prefer to use wait:<duration> task-modifications to take the tasks out of my immediate horizon, giving myself permission to ignore a task, knowing that when the time comes, it will come back.

The first command you should know about is of course the report command. This tells you all the possibilities you have with TW:

• active shows you the tasks you have started.
• all shows you all the pending and completed tasks.
• blocked becomes useful when you start relating tasks to each other as being dependencies of other tasks—blocked tasks can’t be started until other tasks have been completed.
• burndown if you’re familiar with SCRUM project processes, is a view of how much left there is to a project, which can be useful for estimating completion dates.
• completed of course shows you what has been done.
• ghistory gives you a graphical bar-graph of Added, Computed and Deleted tasks. You can view it by month (the default) or annually by adding .annual to the end of the command. If you don’t want the bar graphs, use history instead.
• information is the complete laundry list of details about each task.
• list is just barely more verbose than next, but without showing Urgency.
• long will fill your terminal with task information including: ID, Project,  Priority, Added, Started, Due,      Recurring, Countdown to ready, Age, Dependencies, Tags and of course, its Description.
• ls shows the tasks by ID, Pri, Project and Description.
• minimal shows the tasks by ID, Project and Description and nothing else, it’s the same as ls without Priority.
• newest shows you the tasks you’ve added by their age.
• next is the default action when you run tw without any arguments, showing you the next actions.
• oldest is the opposite of newest and will instantly show you your greatest goals along with your worst procrastinations.
• overdue is exactly what you think it means.
• projects gives you the bird’s eye view of collections of tasks you have. It doesn’t show you the tasks, but it shows how many tasks of each priority there are in each project.
• ready appears to be the same as next.
• recurring is your life-hack to reminders of things that you have to do periodically. I use it to remind myself and track my Omega-3 supplements.
• summary gives you a feel-good progress bar view of your active projects.
• tags shows you your other task classifications other than project. You can use tags for GTD contexts or other project management concepts like tracking assignments to other people.
• unblocked shows you what’s ready to be worked on.
• waiting shows you the tasks that you have pushed into the future.

This just gives you some idea of what you can do with the reports—of course, read the tutorials so you can see how to use TW for adding, changing or removing tasks. If you have any CLI chops, I think you’ll enjoy having TaskWarrior available as a tool without having to resort to vim with a simple text file as your TODO list. Not that there is anything wrong with that…

Filed under: Software, Technology Tagged: Command-line interface, Project management, TaskWarrior

Syndicated 2012-09-07 15:45:58 from sj4nz