one relating to, belonging to, or resembling lunatech
Today I completed 3 years at Yahoo! Bangalore. Thanks to t3rminator for reminding me the happy occasion (t3 had joined a day before I did).
Thanks to great teammates, partners in crime and mentors for making this day possible.
A quote by Steve Jobs
When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It's the truth.
The crap dished out on the Indian tv is mind numbingly bad. The actors in those serials go through the complete spectrum of human emotions in 30 minutes (even less than 30 minutes, if you factor in the ads). The really disheartening part about the whole thing is that there is no conspiracy.
If you have not seen Futurama the Movie: Bender's Big Score yet, do it as soon as you can get your hands on the dvd.
Since my constant companion, the video ipod, cannot play Speex format, I needed to convert a bunch of files .spx files to mp3 format.
This shell script should do the work for you (it will work for files with spaces in them)
sudo find ./ -name '*.spx' | while read FILE; do ogg123 -d wav -f - "$FILE" | lame - "$FILE.mp3" ; done
The -d wav -f - argument to ogg123 make it(ogg123) use the WAV driver
and output the result to the stdout (given by -f -). The stdout from
ogg123 is passed to lame, which converts the wav to mp3. Caveat: The
id3 info in the spx file is lost and you have to add that to the mp3
files manually.
One interesting thing I came to know in this was how to loop over
files with spaces in them. This is done by piping the result of find
to the while read part. More details of this is here
Do you regularly troll through YouTube looking for episodes of your favorite TV shows or to find scenes from a movie you are planning to go to or to find recordings from a conference you could not attend?
In that case, you might find my youtube search - sort by video playtime Yahoo! pipe useful. The pipe has been run 1813 times and it already has 12 clones.
I made the pipe to find myself episodes of Dilbert. Here are some other useful searches
## Geek notes
The base url of the pipe is <http://pipes.yahoo.com/lunatech/ytsbyduration>. Add your query string with '?q=string' to the base url. For example, <http://pipes.yahoo.com/lunatech/ytsbyduration?q=Yahoo>.
Let me know if you found this useful. Happy Tubing!
An interesting mail that came in the Linux User's Group - Delhi mailing list.
hi pradeepto, On Jan 1, 2008 9:21 PM, Pradeepto Bhattacharya <pradeeptob@...> wrote: > > Hi, > > > > IIRC, Niyam mentioned one nice colour management tool during > > freed.in / 07. Does somebody remember that tool's name? > > > > Cheers! > > > > Pradeepto
there's some confusion here. someone recalls it as agave. however, agave is a tool to aid you in finding hopefully pleasing and aesthetic color combinations. It is Agave : http://home.gna.org/colorscheme/
agave is based on some fundamental research that happened towards the end of the 19th century and through 20th century on human cognition and perception of color, specifically on work done by a.h. munsell, and then by johannes itten, not counting several other researchers including a german researcher who took the work of newton and munsell even further.
pradeepto mentions color management. this is quite different from color-combinations. color-management is a science, and is explained further down. the first step to color-management is color-calibration.
color-calibration is all about tuning your device to input, display, or output the right colors. think of color-calibration as the art and technique of tuning your guitar so the strings are in tune. then go ahead and tune in all the other instruments in your band.
the tool for color-calibration under foss is called LProf. this tool is leaps ahead of the color-calibration tool that ships with adobe, called 'adobe gamma', that sits in the control panel of your mac or windows operating system. http://lprof.sourceforge.net/
think of color-management as the more complex science of understanding how to tweak your microphones, mixers, recording equipment, and finally, your mix-down, so your music sounds the same (or similar) on anything from a 5.1 surround sound home theater system, an open-air concert, in-ear headphones, television broadcast, fm radio, am radio, plus all kinds of radio devices, various levels of mp3 compression, DVD-audio specs, mobile ringtone, and even blared through a cheap megaphone in a crowded market.
the color management engine under foss is called littlecms, and in terms of engineering it outclasses apple's colorsync and microsoft's ICM engine. http://www.littlecms.com/
always surprises me how color is so easily understood when explained with analogies from sound. this again thanks to the groundbreaking research by hermann von helmholtz from the 19th century, on physiological psychology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmholtz
pradeepto, hope this helps, and do share with us what you intend to do.
kappy new kear to the kde team 
-- niyam bhushan
