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I'm looking forward to finding the way back to my way of looking forward to things in life.

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My elderly MSI video card with an Nvidia FX-5500 chipset refused to set the screen resolution to those 1920x1080 of my new LG Flatron W2353V flat screen. It simply removed 1920x1080 from the list of valid modes and I ended up with VESAish 1280x1024. It took me quite some time to figure out what to do, so I'm dropping this note, perhaps it will be usefull for others. Things to do:

1. Ensure you got X.org running in some way, e.g. with the VESA driver or in the wrong resolution.
2. Backup your /etc/X11/xorg.conf
3. Install the Nvidia binary driver (use the jockey-gtk tool on Ubuntu, it will do it for you)
4. Run nvidia-xconfig as root, this will overwrite your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. If this goes wrong you can use your previous backup.
5. Open xorg.conf in an editor and put this line in the "Device" section:
   Option "ModeValidation" "DFP-0: AllowNon60HzDFPModes, NoMaxPClkCheck, NoMaxSizeCheck, NoHorizSyncCheck, NoVertRefreshCheck, NoVirtualSizeCheck, NoVesaModes"
   (Ensure that X is using the nvidia driver, otherwise this is guaranteed to fail.)

This basically switches of all sanity that could cause X to remove the desired modeline from its list in the pipeline. Unfortunately, it also bears the risk of screwing your TTYs. With more recent systems such as the Nvidia Quadro and the BenQ 24" display at my office, everything works automagically. But with the old crap at home it doesn't…

Additional hint: use nvidia-settings in X to save the EDID data of your panel and check with parse-edid on the command line what the panel told your video card about its valid modes.

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DrNI@Automatic Mind writes: Text Difficulty and Information Retrieval

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Is there anything worse than procrastinating the studying for your MA oral exam by writing Java code for your MA thesis? Anyways. Here we go with a little preview on a Java library of readability measures. I'm planning to write a longer article about the sense and senselessness of readability measures for my CL Blog. To cut a long story short: readability measures resp. algorithms take a text, split it into words and syllables, and apply some weird formula to that. In the end, you get a figure saying how easy or difficult to read (or understand) the text is supposed to be. One of the most prominent measures is the Flesch-Kincaid Readability Test which is supposed to say how many years of US education one needs in order to be able to understand the given text.


Let's have a look at the screen shot of my demo. First of all, be aware that some or all of the measures might be wrong. As one can see, for the given text, it takes almost 14 years of school education. The text I took is a pirates story for kids from Neopedia, which some of my fellow students might be well aware of because they are currently suffering from a named entity annotation task for that text. So why is this fairy-tale alike story so hard to read? A comparison with the output of this online tool revealed that the sentence counter I'm using cannot deal with the quotation marks used in direct speech and the text contains lots of it. The Flesch-Kincaid formula punishes documents for long sentences, therefore the score goes up the fewer sentences you have.

The sentence counting part currently is based on Java Fathom, a port from Perl's Lingua::EN::Fathom module. The syllable counter is also the Fathom port from there. Apart from that, Java Fathom has a bug preventing it from working at all. I contacted the maintainer. He keeps reacting with silence. So in order to be able to publish this library, I need to re-invent some wheels myself, because other people messed things up. (This is what usually happens if computer scientists try to do something with language.)

As some of my readers may have noticed, I reactivated the Computational Linguistics category here. I consider it to be the CL blather dump from now on. After all, this post isn't enough of a post for my CL Blog.

Stay tuned on both blogs, if everything works out as I hope it to work out, I'll pass the exam next week and I'll publish the open-sourced readability library somewhen in January.

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I'm a monkey yelling into the void. I'm a blogger.

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A good friend of mine – actually the one contributing to DrNI: EM with vocals and keyboards – holds the opinion that people favor visual perception over any other kind of perception. Basically this is the story of MTV and similar TV broadcasters. People don't want to listen. They want to watch. Thus musicians have to produce videos in order to sell songs. Even worse, people apparently don't even want music for free if they can't watch it.


(Zap to YouTube)
Video killed the radio star, as The Buggles had put it in 1979 already. Now these are the days of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Not much of a difference! Just think about how successful YouTube is. So this is a first trial. Yes, the quality of YouTube videos might make some people simply throw up &ndash but it doesn't keep millions of others from watching!

Thanks go to cohabitant T. for his valuable comments in private. He knows a lot more about media sciences and video than I do. I promise to try to do better next time. With something else than a digital (photo) camera, hopefully. And there actually is a high quality mode once you found your way to the video's page on YouTube. For some videos there. For this one, too.

Anyway, I guess we need to show more boobs in order to become famous.

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no@hellmaster:~ > cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [YMF754     ]: YMF754 - Yamaha DS-1E (YMF754)
                 Yamaha DS-1E (YMF754) at 0xfbff0000, irq 18
1 [R15        ]: RME9636 - RME Digi9636 (Rev 1.5)
                 RME Digi9636 (Rev 1.5) at 0xfa000000, irq 20
2 [U0x170b0x11]: USB-Audio - USB Device 0x170b:0x11
                 USB Device 0x170b:0x11 at usb-0000:00:02.0-1, full speed
3 [Interface  ]: USB-Audio - USB Uno MIDI Interface
                 M-Audio USB Uno MIDI Interface at usb-0000:00:02.0-3, full speed
4 [Headset    ]: USB-Audio - Logitech USB Headset
                 Logitech Logitech USB Headset at usb-0000:00:02.2-2.2, full speed

Previously that way. The 170b:0011 is a Swissonic MIDI-USB 1x1. I submitted a patch to the list of USB IDs so Linux will hopefully know the manufacturer and the name of this device in the future. This inexpensive little MIDI interface works flawlessly with my Gentoo.

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no@hellmaster:~ > cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep 'model name'
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+

So there's been a little bit of Christmas today, finally. As in music, there are always better performers. Anyway. A great improvement in comparison to the previous situation.

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mklove && ! mkwar

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...how do you manage to look into their eyes? Do those guys visit you in your dreams? Do they vanish from your mind next time you say that the United States of America need to attack some other country in order to secure their freedom? Do they? Click here for a reminder.

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