Gsallbahdr - English Posts

1920x1080 with elderly Nvidia Cards on Linux

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 09:56:00 +0200

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:

Ensure you got X.org running in some way, e.g. with the VESA driver or in the wrong resolution.
Backup your /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Install the Nvidia binary driver (use the jockey-gtk tool on Ubuntu, it will do it for you)
Run nvidia-xconfig as root, this will overwrite your /etc/X11/xorg.conf. If this goes wrong you can use your previous backup.
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.

Crossref

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:23:07 +0200

DrNI@Automatic Mind writes: Text Difficulty and Information Retrieval

A Preview of my Readability Library

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 12:56:00 +0100

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.

Finding of the Day

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Fri, 4 Jul 2008 20:51:05 +0200

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

First Steps into Video with DrNI: EM

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Sun, 18 May 2008 16:30:00 +0200

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.

Showin Off Da Geek Way! - One More Time

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 11:14:59 +0200

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.

Showin Off Da Geek Way!

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Fri, 4 Jan 2008 17:05:00 +0100

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.

Bash Xmas

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 18:19:24 +0100

mklove && ! mkwar

George, tell me...

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 22:15:00 +0100

...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.

DrNI: EM - Still there?

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 17:20:02 +0200

Just a few minor remarks on the DrNI:EM project. I'm still up and running, and so is the project. However, it's a lack of time and muse that keeps me from recording new stuff. The new »studio« has been finished and is awaiting bursts of creativity. The recording machine is stuck with doing world updates. Gentoo is really making me have a ball these days. Meanwhile I'm trying to do further advertising of my music. Just yesterday and today I uploaded some tracks of the old album to Newgrounds, which I think is a great portal site for Creative Commons-licensed audio material. So I keep collecting ideas, writing down some, recording some snippets...

Something should be happening soon. At least I don't give up hope. Stay tuned!

Wenn die Sonne scheint (Golm Campus, 3)

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 11:55:00 +0200

Wenn die Sonne scheint, dann sieht es doch ganz hinten auch ganz nett aus, auch wenn das Logo eine andere Art von Gebäude vorschlägt, das vielleicht auf einem anderen Campus steht. Weiß ich nicht, da war ich nicht. Das Ende der Fall School ist absehbar. Was nimmt man mit, von den zwei Wochen, in denen man so viel Geld liegen lassen hat? Only time will tell. Und: Das einzig konstante ist die Veränderung. Dann, so zwischendurch, ein kurzer Traum zwischen zwei Sätzen des Dozenten: Wie schön wäre es, jetzt in der Sonne zu liegen und das angestaute Wissen mal einen Tag reifen zu lassen. So wie einen Käse. Aber die nächste Hausaufgabe steht schon im Raum und so wird das neue Wissen schon als Frischkäse genutzt. Zwei Wochen sind kurz, da braucht der Speicher im Gehirn eine hohe Bandbreite, um noch mitzukommen.

Die andere Welt zu Hause dreht sich solange weiter, alles parallel, wie bloggen und zuhören gleichzeitig. Manchmal wünsche ich mir eine paar Konstanten.

Child's Game

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 19:04:00 +0200

Lecture Hall Center Morgenstelle, University of Tübingen

Holy something! Sleeping audience. Sitting there like bricks. My fault, their fault? Dozens of smart comments by the teacher. I feel like a small child trying to do something huge. Like saving the world from the climate catastrophe. Or making parents love each other again. Something you can't do. Something that's not more than a serious game. A child's game.

Unsure about the contents of my bla bla. Not graded. I had no slides for the audience to fall asleep with. Just the black board. And a few lines of source code. Not graded anyways. A child's game. Picking up the bike, riding home to Mami. Game over. Sleeping audience. A hall of bricks.

Nobody likes boring games. Better play alone next time.

Lecture Note (1)

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 09:32:16 +0200

Listening to a talk about a book I've read already. The speaker must be afraid of the audience. She's rushing through the slides in a cold mood, reading a lot of text directly. I feel like leaving, I can't, I don't dare to sleep in here. Afraid of annoying people with my snoring, perhaps. Maybe I'm just so overwhelmingly nice - I'll never make it anywhere this way. Instead of performing an offending public snoring session in class me & myself start some deep thinking about life and the mess it is. All of a sudden I wish to be able to play the guitar. Some nonsensical sensitive song about love in the summer rain... it comes to my mind that I can't sing either.

Comment: I tend to think and therefore write in the language that surrounds me. My lectures resp. seminars are usually taught in English.

Bruises That Won't Heal / After All Those Years

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Mon, 9 Apr 2007 17:21:00 +0200

We met at the breakfast table of an upper class hotel. An inexpensive accommodation for us westerners down there in Czechia. The coffee was acceptable and so was the food. Soon we found ourselves in a conversation about the corpora business and the job. But quite naturally you can't talk about this all the time and every time. The waiters were a bit lazy. Waiting for a refill of the liquid brown jump start we switched to politics and society. The war. What about the war?

Apparently none of the educated people seem to like it. Not surprisingly, you may find. Topic number one of course: Iraq and the Bush administration. The people surrounding the table were two Britons, one guy from Romania and me, from Germany. Common agreement: Mr. President has gone nuts, could somebody please stop him. We exchanged opinions and stories. I told that my father was a six-year-old boy when World War 2 came to his home town. Some British folks still believe that all Germans were evildoers in WW2. Some Europeans still believe that all US Americans are standing behind their Mr. President. I hope that's not true.

»Children fight and woman cry«, Kieran Halpin sings in his song Senzenina (What have we done?), published on the album Glory Dayz featuring the late Chris Jones on guitar. While Senzenina is a song about apartheid in Africa, the line is still true for every war. In the end, children fight and woman cry. In WW2 there was this particular night when my father and grandmother didn't make it to the shelter. The alarms were wailing. They hid in their own basement. The next day, they found that the shelter was no more there. Only a large hole in the ground... my father's school mates had been in there.

That's what war turns out to be. I told them. I thought maybe the British folks sitting at the table could consider that, after all those years of peace and communication. After all those years of becoming one Europe. Perhaps they could start considering that some of the non-evildoers back then suffered badly.

»Actually my father is an Auschwitz survivor«, the British woman said. »He never got over it.«

I had no more words to say in that particular moment.

Some Final Remarks: Open Source and Free Music

nospam@example.com (DrNI) — Sun, 25 Mar 2007 13:43:00 +0200

With this post I'm closing the series about my album Constant Change. There is a lot more I could report about. Lessons I learned, ideas I had. I'm trying to stick to two topics: free software and free music.

The whole project was conducted using free software. There are too many programs involved to mention all of them. To name a few outstanding ones: Ardour was used as Digital Audio Workstation. If you're interested in Linux and Recording, please do donate. The only sequencer in use was Seq24 which is still not fully stable but still very simple to use. The cover artwork was done entirely with Open Office. It may be not the finest one of the DTP tools but it does the job. All background pictures of sleeve, cover, and label were taken using a horribly cheap China-made Lomo-style camera made from plastics. This camera takes four pictures in one second and the outcome tends to be rather experimental.

The plan to release this album under the terms of a Creative Commons (CC) license came up before it was even started. It should be made using free software and it should be free. Later on I found that this enabled me to use many great samples from Freesound. Does CC licensed music keep artists from having success? I don't think so. But you can make the best music in the world, or the worst. It will not be a primary factor for your success. There seem to be only a few listeners choosing their music according to how good or bad it is. I think most people don't even consider what they like and what they don't. At least with a certain tendency they like what is advertised the best. And that's when record companies come into play. And that's where CC licensed music drops out.

Myspace and last.fm profiles won't help artists with this respect. Who uses the buggy CCHits? There is virtually no radio play for CC licensed music. And often times those artists create music they like and don't care about the masses. (Again that's when record companies... yeah.) So in case you're a free music advertisement specialist, get in touch.

Meanwhile I'll make some plans for my next project.