This is a pro­ject I’ve been work­ing on for the past quar­ter for my EE47 class. I didn’t want to make just a per­son­al mu­sic play­er, but in­stead a per­son­al mu­sic per­for­mance - and this is the more-or-less first pro­to­type of that. It could be de­scribed as a “vir­tu­al turntable”: you load songs in­to it, and then you can play them back as if they were on a record. You can slow down or speed up the record, or grab it and scratch it.

Read more about the de­tails of the im­ple­men­ta­tion on the class pro­ject page.

Both Ama­zon and Newegg (and pre­sum­ably thou­sands of other on­line stores) sort by av­er­age cus­tomer rat­ing when told to sort by rat­ing. If I were shop­ping for, say, com­put­er mon­i­tors on Newegg, and I was look­ing for one that was re­li­able and rat­ed high­ly by a lot of peo­ple, the av­er­age rat­ing sys­tem might be mis­lead­ing. Say there is an HP mon­i­tor for sale, which 500 peo­ple bought and liked. One per­son, how­ev­er, bought it and found a few dead pix­els (man­u­fac­tur­ing de­fect - it hap­pens), and so rat­ed it low. The mon­i­tor’s av­er­age rat­ing would be 4.98 out of 5.00 or some­thing like that.

Now con­sid­er a no-name mon­i­tor that one per­son bought and liked. He or she is the on­ly per­son to have ev­er rat­ed this mon­i­tor, and rat­ed it a 5, mak­ing the mon­i­tor’s av­er­age rat­ing 5.00. 5.00 for this no-name mon­i­tor is high­er than 4.98 for the HP mon­i­tor - this would put the no-name mon­i­tor high­er up on the list if I asked Newegg to sort by “Best rat­ing”.

For a se­lec­tion of two prod­ucts this seems like a mi­nor prob­lem, but if I were look­ing for, per­haps, a new DVD burn­er, the hun­dreds of prod­ucts which re­ceived two or three 5.00 re­views would fill up many pages of my search with ir­rel­e­vant prod­ucts - I would not con­sid­er one or two peo­ple rat­ing a pro­duct a 5.00 to be an ac­cu­rate indi­ca­tion that the pro­duct is, on the whole, re­li­ably con­struct­ed. I would have to wade through all those pages be­fore I found the first pro­duct rat­ed by more than about five peo­ple.

There must be a bet­ter way to sort prod­ucts by cus­tomer rat­ing than sim­ply by av­er­age rat­ing, which pro­duces mis­lead­ing re­sults. Newegg’s sort by num­ber of rat­ings is bet­ter but still not ex­act­ly it. What if five hun­dred peo­ple bought a pro­duct and rat­ed it bad­ly? I think a bet­ter so­lu­tion might be some sort of weight­ed av­er­age - 4.98s can be pulled high­er than 5.00s if they have more rat­ings. Some­thing along the li­nes of (score * num­ber-of-re­views), so that the 500 5.00s that the bet­ter pro­duct re­ceived counts more than the two 5.00s that the in­fe­ri­or pro­duct re­ceived.

This is a mouse that was on­ce bro­ken but is now healed. (A me­chan­i­cal switch on the cir­cuit board was bro­ken; upon fix­ing that, the mouse works al­most like-new.) I was ac­tu­al­ly quite sur­prised at the ex­treme sim­plic­i­ty of the ac­tu­al mouse hard­ware - a cou­ple of re­sis­tors, ca­pac­i­tors, an LED for the sen­sor, and the sen­sor chip it­self. It seems to me that the costs for build­ing such a mouse must be rather cheap in­deed. In fact, I won­der now about the op­ti­cal track­balls out on the mar­ket to­day - mine (the Kens­ing­ton Ex­pert Mouse) is to all ap­pear­ances just an up­side-down op­ti­cal mouse with a ball and a cou­ple of ex­tra but­tons; would it be per­haps pos­si­ble to con­struct my own per­fect­ly-func­tion­ing track­ball with on­ly cheap op­ti­cal mouse parts?

Fas­ci­nat­ing as that may seem, there are in­deed more ex­cit­ing pro­jects to at­tend to first.

(orig­i­nal­ly read here)

One of the prob­lems with us­ing hy­brid Win­dows and Lin­ux en­vi­ron­ments is that one needs to watch close­ly for filesys­tem and file anoma­lies and in­con­sis­ten­cies. Dif­fer­ing end-of-line mark­ers, for ex­am­ple, cause many prob­lems when shar­ing files be­tween the two op­er­at­ing sys­tems. One par­tic­u­lar prob­lem I’ve run in­to is that of hav­ing du­pli­cate files, or in other words, mul­ti­ple files with the same file­name. This can hap­pen if, say, you copy a di­rec­to­ry some­where in Win­dows, then switch to Lin­ux and use a tool such as rsync to copy that same di­rec­to­ry over again. If the cap­i­tal­iza­tion is dif­fer­ent, Lin­ux will not re­place the old files, be­cause Lin­ux, un­like Win­dows, is case-sen­si­tive. This will even hap­pen, and is tech­ni­cal­ly ac­cept­able, on NTFS filesys­tems.

The so­lu­tion I’ve come up with is this sim­ple script, called Re­moveDu­pli­cates.py. Ob­vi­ous­ly, you need Python in­stalled to run it, but it has no ad­di­tion­al de­pen­den­cies. Sim­ply run it in the di­rec­to­ry you wish to clean, and it should do the rest. Note that you shouldn’t use this for en­tire filesys­tems (yet), be­cause it will use ridicu­lous amounts of mem­o­ry if it is given a high num­ber of files. Down­load it here!

P.S. Al­so, I can­not guar­an­tee that this tool will work as in­tend­ed or will be bug-free. Use wise­ly.

One more seem­ing­ly-use­less Log­itech fea­ture: the G15 key­board’s LCD. Gamers that would buy the G15 key­board - most like­ly MMO play­ers and, to a lesser ex­tent, FPS play­ers. The G15’s most out­stand­ing fea­ture is its pletho­ra of assignable macro keys, which makes it won­der­ful for, say, WoW. Why, though, would you look down from the game on your mon­i­tor to check some dim­ly-lit stats on your key­board LCD? Seems point­less to me.

Don’t get me wrong: Log­itech is a won­der­ful pe­riph­er­al com­pa­ny. They make what I con­sid­er to be the world’s best gen­er­al-pur­pose mice (Dell’s ba­sic USB mouse in­clud­ed with their desk­tops, my per­son­al fa­vorite, was¹ made by Log­itech). They make rel­a­tive­ly good, us­able key­boards, some­times with a touch of my pre­ferred min­i­mal­is­tic style (Di­Novo Edge). And, de­spite ar­gu­ments be­tween Log­itech, Raz­er, and now Mi­crosoft users about which gam­ing mouse is the best, there’s no doubt that Log­itech’s, espe­cial­ly the G5, are among the top gam­ing mice avail­able. It’s just that no­body re­al­ly wants to spend ex­tra money buy­ing fea­tures that are com­plete­ly un­nec­es­sary.

Cur­rent­ly, I play a fair amount of Call of Du­ty, which is an ex­cel­lent PC FPS. I prefer it over other mul­ti­play­er PC shoot­ers sim­ply be­cause I think CoD’s gun fir­ing sounds and an­i­ma­tions are much more grat­i­fy­ing. Okay, that’s a lit­tle ex­ag­ger­at­ed: Call of Du­ty is an in­cred­i­ble, pol­ished game with many very good ele­ments. Its mul­ti­play­er is ex­cel­lent when you’re play­ing on com­put­ers that al­ready have the game in­stalled, and with peo­ple that have played shoot­ers be­fore. With both the­se com­po­nents lack­ing, how­ev­er, Call of Du­ty is not a par­tic­u­lar­ly ef­fec­tive mul­ti­play­er ex­pe­ri­ence.

I’m cur­rent­ly look­ing for games that are easy to pick up, can be played in a very short amount of time, and have fair­ly small in­stal­la­tion foot­prints (or bet­ter yet, can be played from a CD or the net­work). Those qual­i­ties, in my opin­ion, will make a game that is much more ac­ces­si­ble than to­day’s games, and will turn video gam­ing in­to a much more in­clu­sive and ul­ti­mate­ly more so­cial­ly suc­cess­ful ac­tiv­i­ty.

Babo Vi­o­lent 2 comes close. It’s small and very, very sim­ple for a shooter. Ob­vi­ous­ly it doesn’t work with peo­ple who don’t en­joy shoot­ing other peo­ple, but it’s about as close to a “par­ty game” as I can think of for the PC. Game con­soles have it bet­ter in this re­spect: Mar­io Par­ty, for ex­am­ple, or DDR, or Gui­tar Hero (although those games have ac­quired some­thing of a hard­core cult sta­tus as well) are good ex­am­ples. I sup­pose I’ll just have to wait pa­tient­ly here for ca­su­al PC gam­ing to catch up and provide us with more ac­ces­si­ble par­ty games.

And like ev­ery­thing else that Google puts out, it is a glo­ri­ous­ly in­cred­i­ble piece of work. It has the best char­ac­ter­is­tics a piece of soft­ware could have: it’s sim­ple, fast, re­spon­sive, and stable. I’ve been run­ning it for just a lit­tle while now, and while We­bKit’s ren­der­ing (espe­cial­ly of fonts) is slight­ly dif­fer­ent from Gecko’s, ev­ery­thing works just about the same as in Fire­fox… it’s all just way, way faster. Open­ing new tabs is faster. Us­ing Gmail is faster (thanks, no doubt, to the new V8 JavaScript engine). Writ­ing posts is faster. It’s re­al­ly quite in­cred­i­ble… in fact, pos­si­bly one of the most im­pres­sive open-source de­vel­op­ments to date, right up there with Fire­fox 1 and the Lin­ux ker­nel. Give it a spin your­self and see.

DDvo­rak, on first glance, is a com­plete­ly unortho­dox typ­ing lay­out. It re­quires com­ma as a dead key for many sym­bols, and Alt­Gr as a mod­i­fier for many others. Ad­di­tion­al­ly, many things are moved to un­con­ven­tion­al lo­ca­tions (BackSpace is where ‘B’ is on QW­ER­TY key­boards, for ex­am­ple). How­ev­er, the lay­out tester con­sis­tent­ly mea­sures the ef­fi­cien­cy of DDvo­rak as sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er than ei­ther Dvo­rak or Cole­mak, no mat­ter whether typ­ing English or code.

I think I’m go­ing to have to give DDvo­rak a try, soon, if on­ly I could fig­ure out how to rad­i­cal­ly change key­board lay­outs in X.org… of course, it’s easy with Win­dows. It wouldn’t be Win­dows if there weren’t a tool for ev­ery­thing.

On the other side of the coin, more gamers should just grow up and re­al­ize that com­pa­nies do want to get paid for mak­ing games, and that they should think about may­be pay­ing for their games ev­ery on­ce in a while. Take the ad­vice found in no-CD crack READMEs to heart: if you like this game, please con­sid­er pur­chas­ing it. If both sides of the “bat­tle” work to­geth­er, we can may­be end this ridicu­lous an­ti-con­sumer non­sense.

Still, it would be nice if more game com­pa­nies would patch their games like this. Prefer­ably a lit­tle soon­er after their game is re­leased too!