trout.res.cmu.edu

Over the last several moves, a few hard drives have followed thanklessly in the bottom of miscellaneous-computer-part crates. Most notable among these is a SCSI drive: the collected works of trout.pc.cc.cmu.edu (later trout.res.cmu.edu), my personal server in college and a machine of minor infamy. As an important part of my data-past, I've thought periodically of that drive, and occasionally even installed it to explore the contents. I never, however, bothered to back up the data on it. This weekend, I became determined to finally do so.

The first obstacle was its SCSI-ness. Not one of my personal machines has SCSI any more. I dug through the aforementioned crates and found a very dusty ISA SCSI card. After much wrangling, including dozens of reboots of a half-working headless server and an actual interrupt conflict (remember those?), the drive mounted happily. Despite my years of neglect, the drive offered up its wares intact, with no complaint.

That semi-precious data now resides on several forms of modern media, and so the old drive is no longer needed. I feel like I should bury it in a tender ceremony or something.

Meanwhile, I now have easy access to everybody's trout home directories. If you were one of the lucky forty-or-so with accounts, contact me and I'll send a tarball your way.

Also among the data is trout's web site, last updated Nov 14, 1995--nine years ago yesterday. For nostalgia's sake, I have a copy of that site up here. Nearly all off-site links are now dead--how's that for permanence of the web? I've also crippled all the cgi-bin script links, since they no longer work.

I also found a prototype version of the site that I apparently never deployed. It's cute but unfinished and almost entirely devoid of content. The PerkWare page does have a cute motto, though.

Both sites make mention of "The UnfortuNet", a pun that I was very happy with at the time. It appears that somebody else came up with a similar idea (http://unfortu.net/)--about a year later, according to whois.

For me, the most important aspect of trout's data resurrection is the mail archives. The resurrection was actually part of my current obsession: collecting all of my old mail archives--from every account I've had since I started using email (1993 or so)--into a single IMAP account. Those archives were scattered across several machines and ancient hard drives, and Trout's hard drive formed the last piece of the puzzle. My IMAP account is now huge.

Audio Mining

I have a question related to "audio mining", the process of analyzing audio clips for the purpose of searching and other processing. I see references on the web (eg, this and this) that suggest that the technology exists and is in use, but only on large (and expensive) scales.

Most of these systems allow you search the audio database with text queries, which requires the database to have undergone speech-to-text analysis. Speech-to-text, particularly for arbitrary (and unfamiliar) speakers is incredibly difficult, and so it's not surprising that these systems are not mainstream or cheap yet.

But I'm interested in a subset of this problem: single-speaker, speech-only search. That is, I record a bunch of audio clips of me speaking, and then I submit a query--in the form of spoken words. So it's only one speaker, and the system never has to interpret the audio as text.

I know this simpler problem is not trivial, but it seems like it should be much simpler than the commercial systems I've read about. And I can't see any examples of this simpler system.

Anybody?

I don't hate people, but I hate you.

Several misguided souls (or "dipshits", as we say in the business) keep posting comment spam on this site. I know this is a common thing now, but it's a pain in the butt. And Movable Type's interface makes it incredibly tedious to delete comments. (A list of the last several hundred posted comments, with checkboxes next to them, and a button to delete all checked comments, would be dandy.) Sigh.

The Spine

I really like They Might Be Giants' new album, The Spine. Their most recent album was a kids album, No!. That album turned out to be a big hit with Emma, so I can't really complain about it, but it made me worry that TMBG would abandon their more adult fare. (Their stuff has never been scandalous or obscene, but it ranged freely through all sorts of subject matter. No! is tame--almost uninterestingly so.) The Spine shows that I needn't worry.

There are several gems, and I need a few more listens before I absorb the bulk of it. My favorite so far is "Bastard wants to hit me", a strangely warbled, paranoid-yet-perky piece in which the speaker is convinced that the stranger over there, waving to me, wants me to come over so he can hit me.

AIDS Walk San Francisco 2004

I took part in Aids Walk San Francisco on Sunday. I was part of the Pixar team, though I ended up walking alone, at first afloat in the river of 21,000 people surging slowly through Golden Gate Park, later fighting the current to find my own faster pace. The weather was perfect--a bit foggy but pleasantly cool. And there are worse places to walk than Golden Gate Park, passing the occasional band, orchestra, or dancing troupe set up alongside the river of people.

It's been a while since I've been in a throng, and I've never been in one this big, let alone one this big and happy. It was a great experience. Many thanks to those who sponsored me on the walk.

Slip the surly bonds of simulated Earth.

The other day I bought a copy of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight. My interest in flight simulators ran out somewhere in high school, but reappeared unexpectedly a week or two ago. In part, this is because it occured to me that the relevant technology has improved by a factor of several hundred since I last ran one. FS2004 has clouds, dynamic weather (updated every fifteen minutes from the web!), and fairly detailed geography for the entire planet, including 24,000 airports.

Playing it has also made me realize that I knew nothing about flying. Well, not nothing--I could fumble through the sky the moment I started it--but the built-in training program introduced me to the foreign concepts of coordinated turns and control surface trim--both rudimentary aspects of flight. ("Wait, you're telling me that Wing Commander isn't realistic?")

What's worse, my sudden interest in the subtleties of flight have me eyeing sim-geek accoutrements such as high-end yokes and scenery add-ons. Let's hope I get over this before I start buying add-ons for random aircraft.

Review: Fahrenheit 9/11

I saw Fahrenheit 9/11 a week ago, but never got around to commenting here. As markv says, it's hard to do the film justice, so please see it if you haven't. Here's my take:

Fahrenheit 9/11 is propaganda. It doesn't try to be fair, and it doesn't pull any punches. It's also not easy to watch. Watching it, though, you do get the feeling that something big and new is going on. It's not the war itself, or the politics surrounding it--we've sort of become inured to those. It's not even the Bush Administration Conspiracy Theory on which the film is based. Whether or not you buy into it, we've all heard tell of sinister motives in high places. The big and new thing is, instead, an escalation of the dialogue surrounding the war.

The sentiments in Fahrenheit 9/11 are familiar--a lot of us have been opposed to the war from the start. The "revelations" in the film are also not new, at least to anybody who reads more than the front page. But the beauty and the horror of the presentation, and (it turns out) the scope of the audience it's reaching, are stunning. Considering the impact this film could have in this election year, I would be surprised if similar, opposing films didn't appear--and soon. For better or worse, the gloves have come off.

It remains to be seen if anybody can muster a suitable response. Moore is an incredible filmmaker. If Bowling for Columbine didn't show that, then this film certainly does. In it, Moore paints a picture of a crooked, manipulative, violent administration. He paints it almost entirely with the words and images of others, but especially with those of the administration itself. The funny, the ghastly, and the infuriating alternate and then blur together. He paints a vivid picture.

There are parts of Moore's painting that I believe, and parts that I don't. But the administration has its own painting, which it has fed to us in pieces for several years. Of all the stories I've heard, the official one is the least believable. If this film accomplishes anything, I hope it reminds people that there are other, often more plausible interpretations than the ones we're given.