Tech of the day: The R language

Just read an article about R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics.

It reminds me of my days of studying statistics in college. Matlab was the popular software back then. Of course, it is a commercial product that must have cost my school some money to pay for the license whereas R is free. (Never get a chance to play with the famous SAS or SPSS software, which appears to be even more expensive)

An interesting quote from the above article comes from SAS:

“I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code," said Anne H. Milley, director of technology product marketing at SAS. She adds, “We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

It makes no sense to me. Isn't statistics software just a tool for R&D and testing? It's the quality of the work that matters. One could do a worse job with commercial software!

BTW, if you want to play with R but found that it is difficult to Google because R is such a common term, try R seek.

Musician of the day: Al Di Meola

My impression of Al Di Meola was mainly influenced by his fusion/electric guitar work even though he's equally well known playing acoustic, for example, on the previously mentioned trio album with Paco De Lucia and John McLaughlin.

Similarly, for Astor Piazzolla, I am more familiar with his tango music. When I heard Al Di Meola's Diabolic Inventions and Seduction for Solo Guitar, Vol. 1: Music of Astor Piazzolla , that's a pleasant surprise! The most interesting thing is: the customer reviews are quite extreme on Amazon. The ones who diss the album thinks the percussions are computer generated loops (but the album gives credit to Hernan Romero!)

I would also recommend another album on which he appeared as guest: Black Utopia by keyboardist Derek Sherinian. Track #2 features him, Yngwie Malmsteen and Billy Sheehan. That's what I call All-Star!

Album of the day: Steelin' The Beatles

In addition to harmonica, another instruments that I try to get more familiar with is steel guitar. I mean the type that is played flat (on the player's lap, a table or a stand) instead of being held up. You hear steel guitar music almost everywhere in Hawaii but it also appears in other genre: blues, country and even jazz.

Steel guitarist Joe Goldmark's music is classified as "instrumental country" and his arrangement of Beatles is quite interesting (certainly to any Beatles fan)

Topic of the day: aggregation and copyright infringement?

For those who are not familiar with the term aggregation, let me show you an example: Doggdot.us, one of my favorite site. All it shows is a collection of summaries and links to articles from three other websites: Digg, Slashdot and Del.icio.us. The underlying mechanism is extremely simple: those 3 sites all provide RSS feeds, which contain the summaries and links. So Doggdot.us just need to read those feeds, format and display (and profit from those ads!)

In essense we have a Site A that is showing partial content from Site B and refer readers from A to B for the full content. This seems innocent enough that it's quite a common practice but finally we have a Site B suing Site A for copyright infringement: GateHouse v NY Times Co.

Naysayers claim that in this case Site A (Boston.com, owned by NY Times) is driving traffic to Site B (various smaller newspaper website owned by GateHouse) and that's beneficial to GateHouse too so why don't they show some love?

On the other hand, some argue the summaries are so well assimilated on Boston.com that it could be confusing to tell who is the originator of the content. Also, GateHouse has put in specific blocking to prevent Boston.com from reading the feed and it seems that the latter put in extra effort to circumvent that. Finally, GateHouse's RSS feed is under Creative Common non-commerical license and NY Times is obviously a commercial entity.

Topic of the day: ineffective use of a scapegoat

If the use of a scapegoat is so obvious, it is no longer effective as a scapegoat, isn't it? Oh well, people never learn.

RIAA had been using MediaSentry for investigating music piracy but it had just fired MediaSentry because the latter has been 'invading the privacy of people' Do you think RIAA didn't know that's what MediaSentry did all along?

Tech of the day: Ubuntu is not ready for everyone (yet)

What support my argument is of course purely anecdotal. Here is my story: I shot a video in 16:9 MJPEG and wanted to upload it to YouTube (which just started to support 16x9) I didn't upload it as-is because (1) even though it was only 2 min, it took 300Mb space and it would take forever to upload so I need to transcode it to something smaller, and (2) I need to trim the beginning and ending a little bit.

To perform this task, I have the following apps in mind
- Windows Movie Maker (WMM)
- Kino

WMM is pretty good for quick-and-dirty editing and transcode to WMV (let's face it. 99% of people whom I shared my family video with have computers that could play WMV. I can't say the same for other formats. BTW, another app I used frequently was Adobe Premiere Pro, mainly for building DVD from DV I shot. However, it didn't seem to recognize MJPEG.)

I was mistaken that WMM doesn't handle 16:9 (it does. Just pick 16:9 in the option window) so I googled for an open source solution and found that Kino was a popular one and was available as Ubuntu package. I have Ubuntu Feisty Fawn on my workstation and I was able to find Kino (0.92) in Synaptic package manager. However, when Synaptic actually tried downloading it, it wasn't available. I googled again and this particular version doesn't seem to be available from anywhere!

So I just give up on Kino. You Linux power users will of course think that I was lame because there are several options:
- package of newer version of Kino is available. I could have installed them and see if it is compatible with Feisty. If not, I could always upgrade to the latest Ubuntu.

- compile the source of 0.92. I actually tried this. When I configure, it couldn't even generate the Makefile properly because a library is missing (which Synaptic tells me I had installed already) 

Will I still recommend Ubuntu to my friends? You bet! Provided they are not "non-guru semi-power user" who do things beyond basic web surfing/e-mail, i.e., in the same boat as mine!

Musicians of the day: great harmonicists

I'm in the mood of some good harmonica music and found this playlist from Rhapsody. It features some of the most famous harmonicists ever:
- Larry Adler
- Toots Thielemans
- Sigmund Groven