USA

Earlier this year I travelled to the USA for SIGIR 2009. I visited New York City, Boston, Santa Fe, Los Alamos and Taos. I have made another travel map!




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Long Distance

Q: Why did the programmer call his mother long distance?
A: Because that was her name.

Computing Then

Computing Then is an interesting look into the past of computing. With much focus on the "now" of computing and electronics, this is a nice break. I always enjoy the 16 & 32 years ago column in the IEEE Computer publication. I remember 16 years ago quite vividly but alas I am not 32 yet. The older I get, the less powers of 2 I get to experience. I doubt I will make 2^7.

Adaptive Compression of the Dynamic Range

Dynamic range compression is a technique used by audio engineers to optimise the distribution of frequencies in a mix. In popular music it is often abused, resulting in a flat and overly loud sound. An audio engineer applies some static parameters of threshold, knee, compression ratio, attack, delay and gain based on the typical listening environment of their anticipated user. This is why you can hear your favourite top 40 track in a noisy environment but you can barely hear classical music at the same volume level on your audio device. Therefore, I propose that these parameters should adapt to the environment of the user. If it is noisy, the compression ratio is pushed up and if it is quiet it can be relaxed. By intuition, I assume that this would be a relatively easy solution to solve with machine learning. My simple explanation with one of the parameters is trivial. I am sure more complex relationships exist between the parameters and user satisfaction. If someone could embed this in a popular music player with the correct audio source, it could be a winning combination. However, this requires an unmastered, or a minimally mastered audio source.

Dusty

This dust storm in Broken Hill just blew my mind. Looks so awesome!

Europe

I recently traveled to Europe to attend INEX.





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500 days

# uptime
06:01:30 up 509 days,  6:12,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Now that I have passed the 500 day mark I can bring myself to install a new distro. Time to say good bye to Slackware after 14 years and replace it with noobuntu server. Package management just seems easier. This is my last box with Slackware still on it.