06.18.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 2:38 pm by Administrator
So, I recently upgraded to Dapper on my thinkpad laptop. Everything seems to work now, but I had some major problems when installing it from the docking station. When I installed Dapper using the dvd-drive in the docking station, it couldn’t mount the root partition unless it was connected to the docking station. When attached to the docking station, everything worked fine. There are a bunch of proposed solutions to things of this nature, but all involve recompiling the kernel and I just didn’t want to do that. Instead, I reinstalled Breezy and upgraded it. The only problem now is that I can’t get the docking station to work. All the old fixes for getting the middle button to scroll and such still work and NetworkManager is integrated much better into Gnome. To get my wireless card (Linksys) I had to blacklist the built-in driver (which doesn’t work).
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05.05.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:25 pm by Administrator
So, I was thinking about this a while ago. The big problem with speech recognition is, well, it sucks. Accuracy for general transcription just isn’t good enough for widespread adoption. It’s currently being used primarily in areas with an extremely limited grammar and lexicon. For things like this, it seems to work pretty well. Also, programmers type a lot, in fact they often end up getting carpal tunnel and related problems. Coincidentally, programming languages are, by definition, rigorously defined and limited languages. They have clearly defined grammars and lexicons. Coincidentally, the lack of these properties are precisely why natural languages are so darn difficult for speech recognition systems. So using speech recognition for dictation of computer programming languages should be easy, right? I got motivated and spent a while looking around online for some kind of programmer’s dictation application or plugin. I failed, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything out there, so if anyone finds anything, feel free to let me know. I did find SpeechClipse, but that’s a plugin for editing commands and such, not dictation. So, as of now, I think I have a project to start this summer. Sphinx-4 is a well-organized, well-documented, ASR system implemented in java. The Java language specification is, well, a complete syntactic description of java. I just have to reformat the grammar and create a language model and setup sphinx to use that language model. Also, I just love eclipse, so I figure I’ll try to do all of this as an eclipse plugin. There are tons of good tutorials. Here is one I like.
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02.22.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 7:57 pm by Administrator
I found some good resources here and here. The only problem I’m still having is that for some reason when I set the THINKPAD button to run /usr/bin/gnome-terminal, I get two new consoles when I only really want one.
I also installed ndiswrapper and drivers for my wpc54gs wireless card. That was easy, but for a while I didn’t know I had to do “ndiswrapper -m” to get it to load at boot time.
Some more cool stuff that I fould. VLC video player is awesome and it looks decent, too if you use the skins. I much prefer it to kaffiene and totem, especially kaffiene. Also, even though you can’t get quicktime or such things with linux, if you use the Media Player Connectivity plugin for firefox, you can easily open embedded video in whatever player you want. Also, network-manager is nice and easy, as long as you remember to add nm-applet to the startup session.
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02.01.06
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:59 pm by Administrator
I for one, think object databases are promising. I’m currently taking a databases course and even though we won’t be studying object data databases at all, I think they’re fascinating. I do think there are some major problems, especially with what seem to be the most common implementations. Object databases need to be simply persistent objects, as the most simple specification define them. Imagine all the efficiency and storage of a database, but with the ability to interact in a standard object-oriented programming language. I know it’s hyped and there are many problems and increased costs, but ultimately, efficiency isn’t going to be as important as programming time and ease of interfacing. If implemented smartly it could also vastly improve prefetching by prefetching all objects linked to by an object currently in use. I really don’t know all that much about low level implementation of object databases and how it differs from relational databases, but it seems that there are possibilities for major advantages over traditional databases. One particular interesting project is Ozone .
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Posted in Uncategorized at 10:38 pm by Administrator
So, that was a long time without me writing anything. It’s all Laura’s fault. She gave me a diary thing with pictures of all our friends from last summer that I wrote in most of the time. Anyhow, Laura came, we had an incredible time. We went to Eger, Budapest, Vienna, Salzburg, and Prague. It was pretty much amazing everywhere, from the old plump woman walking around outside in her underwear asking about “your lady” (Laura) to Prague all covered in snow. As I mentioned, Eger was fabulous, we went to the wine cellars, walked around in the park, took a walking tour of the castle. Had the trout that my dad fell in love with. Just had a great time. We got back to Budapest in time for the end of program party ordeal. It was really nice, getting together and having fun one last time. I’m really going to miss everyone a lot, the hungarians and fellow americans. It was just a swell time. Then, we were off to Vienna, also fabulous, where we saw the Hofburg and the treasury and everything amazing and golden in the world, went to Figaro at the state opera house, and went to some christmas markets. The church place was amazing but really creepy, too many skeletons for my taste. Then off to Salzburg, for what was supposed to be an afternoon but due to complications with the dang train we spent the night there. That was a beautiful city. For about the last hour of the train ride I would poke laura every five minutes and point outside and say MOUNTAINS!! I miss mountains. They’re pretty. The next day, we took off for prague. It snowed a lot!! So much, in fact, that a tree fell on the train tracks and delayed us for about 3-4 hours. NOT COOL! But, that meant that in the end, when we got to prague, everything was covered in snow, which was, in a word, breathtaking. It was absolutely amazing! The city is incredible anyway, old, historic, well-preserved, charming (minus the disgusting touristy crap), etc. But covered in snow it was something else, some kind of magical winter wonderland. Eventually we had to leave and go back to Budapest, where laura got to meet gyuri and mano, who are absolutely Awesome, as well as the mcgraths, who have got to be the best people in the world. It was fun being back in Budapest, too. We went to Szechenyi (we went to Rudas earlier), went to the terror museum, went to the opera, just had a nice last few days. In the end, we went home, and I got to be warm for about a week, in Florida, which was pretty sweet. Anyhow, now I’m back at carleton and life feels pretty much normal again. My semester abroad was fabulous and wonderful and I’m incredibly glad I did it, but it’s so good to be back home. Coming back to carleton and spending time with my friends, after about 15 minutes I forgot I’d even left. I just love carleton. Budapest and Hungary and Hungarians are wonderful, though. I definitely plan on returning and I’d highly reccommend it as a slightly more adventurous travel destination.
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11.12.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:59 am by Administrator
So concerts here are awesome. I went to my third concert at the Palace of the Arts last night and it was fabulous. We saw the Gypsy orchestra playing and it was great. I think the dulcimers they have here might be my new favorite instrument. There’s just such an amazing variety to the sound that people can get out of them. But gypsy music is neat. It’s almost more like jazz in a way than western art music. There seems to be a much greater emphasis on individual expression and less on group cohesion and unity. That’s not to say it’s a disorganized mess of sound but there’s not really the sense of “one big instrument” that you can get with a traditional orchestra. Thursday night I went to see some Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. That was quite powerful. It was performed by the national philharmonic orchestra with the national choir and a children’s choir. And almost the best of all of it is that being a student every concert only costs $1!
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11.08.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:27 am by Administrator
So, I just don’t even know what to say about Bled. It was probably the most picturesque place I’ve ever been in my life. I felt like I was stepping into a fairy tale. It was unbelievably beautiful! So Bled is a city on a lake with a really old castle on top of a steep rocky cliff, with a massive church on an island in the lake, and in the background you see the Alps. It was just incredible. I pretty much just walked around in the hills around Bled for a couple of days, but it was just so fabulously peaceful and relaxing. On the way back to Budapest. I stopped in Zagreb for a few hours. People have told me Zagreb isn’t that nice but I thought it was a really pleasant, almost academic town. I walked through the city market and the university and just a swell time. And now I’m back in Budapest.
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11.03.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 12:04 pm by Administrator
Soo, last week, class, etc. People left on Friday and Saturday to go do exciting things, but I wasn’t sure what I was going to do and wanted a few days to unwind. This ended up being a good thing because Saturday night I finally got a chance to meet up with the family from Menomonie who work for the State department. Their house is AMAZING!! It’s like a museum. It’s ON Buda hill, a mostly pedestrian-only area that encompasses the castle, Matyas Templom and lots of other old historic buildings. It’s at least 200-300 years old and was probably owned by some kind of Hapsburg nobility because it’s got the lion everywhere. There’s an incredible view of the city, too. On sunday night I went to see the Cleveland orchestra play.. for a DOLLAR!! That was cool. There are some amazing student discounts over here. But that was an absolutely fabulous concert. Other than that, I pretty much sat around and did nothing Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Tuesday I got motivated, decided to go somewhere, picked Slovenia, and now I’m in Slovenia. Slovenia is Absolutely amazing though. The train ride over here was absolutely phenomenal! We were just at the foothills of the alps, but it was just magnificent. Ljubljana is a wonderful city. The downtown is small enough to manage but big enough to stay exciting. The river runs right through the downtown, with both sides being a large pedestrian only area. It’s beautiful at night! I’ll try to put up some pictures. Tomorrow I go to Bled.
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10.25.05
Posted in Uncategorized at 8:20 am by Administrator
So last weekend, we went to Eger and it was AWESOME!! Eger is an important historical town, but at least as important is the fact that it has some absolutely marvelous wines! I really like Hungarian wines. There are a lot of different varieties, but my current favorite is a kind of middle of the road, semisweet, semidry red wine. It’s kekfrankos and quite tasty. The merlot and cabernet souvignon are also good, but for some reason the kekfrankos really hits the spot for me. Eger is most famous for the bikaver, or bull’s blood, which is a combination of kekfrankos, merlot and cabernet souvignon. It’s good, too. I hadn’t had much for sweet wines before coming to hungary, but there are a few tasty sweet wines, too. Medina is good, but a bit too sweet for me, honestly. So enough about wine. Eger is beautiful! It’s a delightful old town with a pleasant city center and a host of beautiful buildings. There’s even a castle and a hot springs to top it all off! I just had an absolutely grand time and would highly recommend Eger the next time you’re in the region.
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Posted in Uncategorized at 7:47 am by Administrator
The FBI has conducted clandestine surveillance on some U.S. residents for as long as 18 months at a time without proper paperwork or oversight.(Washington Post)
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