For the 3 people in the universe who have my exact same problem, that is, they can’t record audio using a microphone on the CMI8738 card under Linux… here’s the solution:

To enable the microphone on the 0.9 series:

1. run “alsactl store”
2. edit /etc/asound.state. Set “Mic As Center/LFE” to “false”.
3. run “alsactl restore” If your Mic is set to “Record” and capture
level is appropriately high, the Mic should now work.

(My thanks to Lukasz Weber for pointing this out.)

There is also a friendly way: kmix allows you to set the “Mic As Center/LFE” property to “false” using the GUI.

Yes. I wasted 4 hours on this.

More interesting notes:

• mhWaveEdit is the coolest sound recording software under Linux. The author should take a course in marketing though: what kind of name is that? “mhWaveEdit”!?!

I installed IrfanView on my wife’s computer today (Windows 98 — yep!). My wife is in charge of editing our pictures, and she complained about the tools she had… so I decided to try something new. IrfanView is freeware and, I must say, pretty impressive. Mostly, it is a simple tool for picture editing. It doesn’t try to be another Photoshop and it runs fast.

I’ve spent good money about 2 years ago on a similar piece of software which shall remain nameless. It was so bad, I uninstalled in within minutes. I’m not claiming software ought to be free, but I never want to buy another piece-of-software-on-a-CD.

I tried to convince my wife to use Gimp, but Gimp is just too contrived for most people. I’ve got a Ph.D., and I would need two hours to correct red eyes using it.

If you are into Business Intelligence, this might interest you: the 2005 QlikView Think Outside The Cube Contest is open.

We’re inviting you to “Think Outside The Cube” and move beyond the limits of traditional OLAP-based BI.Your application/entry can be a QlikView application that covers anything – results and statistics from a favorite sport, stock tracking, movies, fantasy football, financial results from obscure stock exchanges, your kids’ swim team times, the price of tea in China. Anything that generates data is fair game.

(Organized by QlikTech.)

Through Geomblog, I got to this Sample Cover Letter for Journal Manuscript Resubmissions

Sample Cover Letter for Journal Manuscript Resubmissions
by Roy F. Baumeister
Dear Sir, Madame, or Other:

Enclosed is our latest version of Ms # 85-02-22-RRRRR, that is, the re-re-re-revised revision of our paper. Choke on it. We have again rewritten the entire manuscript from start to finish. We even changed the goddamn running head! Hopefully we have suffered enough by now to satisfy even you and your bloodthirsty reviewers.

I shall skip the usual point-by-point description of every single change we made in response to the critiques. After all, it is fairly clear that your reviewers are less interested in details of scientific procedure than in working out their personality problems and sexual frustrations by seeking some kind of demented glee in the sadistic and arbitrary exercise of tyrannical power over helpless authors like ourselves who happen to fall into their clutches. We do understand that, in view of the misanthropic psychopaths you have on your editorial board, you need to keep sending them papers, for if they weren’t reviewing manuscripts they’d probably be out mugging old ladies or clubbing baby seals to death. Still, from this batch of reviewers, C was clearly the most hostile, and we request that you not ask him or her to review this revision. Indeed, we have mailed letter bombs to four or five people we suspected of being reviewer C, so if you send the manuscript back to them the review process could be unduly delayed.

Some of the reviewers’ comments we couldn’t do anything about. For example, if (as review C suggested) several of my recent ancestors were indeed drawn from other species, it is too late to change that. Other suggestions were implemented, however, and the paper has improved and benefited. Thus, you suggested that we shorten the manuscript by 5 pages, and we were able to accomplish this very effectively by altering the margins and printing the paper in a different font with a smaller typeface. We agree with you that the paper is much better this way.

One perplexing problem was dealing with suggestions #13-28 by Reviewer B. As you may recall (that is, if you even bother reading the reviews before doing your decision letter), that reviewer listed 16 works that he/she felt we should cite in this paper. These were on a variety of different topics, none of which had any relevance to our work that we could see. Indeed, one was an essay on the Spanish-American War from a high school literary magazine. The only common thread was that all 16 were by the same author, presumably someone whom Reviewer B greatly admires and feels should be more widely cited. To handle this, we have modified the Introduction and added, after the review of relevant literature, a subsection entitled “Review of Irrelevant Literature” that discusses these articles and also duly addresses some of the more asinine suggestions in the other reviews.

We hope that you will be pleased with this revision and will finally recognize how urgently deserving of publication this work is. If not, then you are an unscrupulous, depraved monster with no shred of human decency. You ought to be in a cage. May whatever heritage you come from be the butt of the next round of ethnic jokes. If you do accept it, however, we wish to thank you for your patience and wisdom throughout this process and to express our appreciation of your scholarly insights. To repay you, we would be happy to review some manuscripts for you; please send us the next manuscript that any of these reviewers submits to your journal.

Assuming you accept this paper, we would also like to add a footnote acknowledging your help with this manuscript and to point out that we liked the paper much better the way we originally wrote it but you held the editorial shotgun to our heads and forced us to chop, reshuffle, restate, hedge, expand, shorten, and in general convert a meaty paper into stir-fried vegetables. We couldn’t, or wouldn’t, have done it without your input.

Here’s what Einstein answered to Physical Review when they came back with comments from referees:

Dear Sir,

We (Mr. Rosen and I) had sent you our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed. I see no reason to address the – in any case erroneous – comments of your anonymous expert. On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.

Respectfully,

P.S. Mr. Rosen, who has left for the Soviet Union, has authorized me to represent him in this matter.

(I got to this through Geomblog who cites a Cosmic Variance’s post.)

Today, I hit a strange KDE bug. I couldn’t move or resize windows. Here’s the cure:

killall kwin
kwrapper kwin -replace &


KDD 2006 will be held in Philadelphia next year.

During the past years, the ACM SIGKDD conference has established itself as the premier international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining with an attendance of 600-900 people. To continue with this tradition, the twelfth ACM SIGKDD conference will provide a forum for researchers from academia, industry, and government, developers, practitioners, and the data mining user community to share their research and experience. The SIGKDD conference will feature keynote presentations, oral paper presentations, poster presentations, workshops, tutorials, and panels, as well as the KDD Cup competition. KDD-2006 will also award scholarships to selected students to help defray the cost of participating in the conference. Details will appear on the conference Web site as they become available

Slashdot reports that there is no geek shortage. One of the comment is interesting:

There is a glut of Ph.D’s in the US creating an over-competitive environment that’s drastically deflating the pay level. What really should be done, is restricting the Ph.D’s that schools push out to help overcompensate for the over inflation. But this won’t happen. Why? Grad students are cheap labor for PI’s. Schools accept grad students not because they are interesting in training and bringing more qualified people into the field, but rather because they need them to work for PI’s. A PI is only as good as his/her grad students. If you add in a post-doc period, you are looking at, in some cases, 10 years (a figure nowadays that has been increasing as many people are having to do multiple post-docs) of getting paid 1/2 of what you would have gotten if you had just gone straight into industry. Mind you, this isn’t a bread and butter time either. This is a period where (in most cases), people are spending ridiculous hours working weekends/nights trying desperately to get data. And for what? An even more competitive academic environment where the positions to applicants ratio is (in some fields) 1:10. We haven’t even gotten to the whole tenure track part. Add in all these factors and it is not surprising that 1 in 3 of these students never even complete their graduate “training”–most fighting for a masters.

I hate to seem pessimistic, but this article is long overdue, and at the same time, disturbing. We are flooding the market with ambitious bright individuals with promises of great prestige and fortune.

I really think they need to make a “Sims:The rise to professor” game depicting the rather long and gruesome journey to professorship. It would have to be realistic, so on average, you should only be winning, say, 5% of the time. Most people don’t realize how different the actual and perceived opinion of prospective graduate students is from the actual reality of academia. I’m actually quite surprised that only 4-5% of Ph.D’s are working outside their field (mind you, this figure doesn’t include people that wanted to be in academia but couldn’t get a position and ended up in industry). Sadly, I know a few that are working in simple jobs as security guards.

VLDB 2006 will be held in Seoul, Korea.

We invite submissions reporting original results on all aspects of data management as well as proposals for panels, tutorials, and demonstrations that will present the most critical issues and views on practical leading-edge database technology, applications, and techniques. We also invite proposals for events and workshops that may take place at the Conference site between September 10th and 11th before the VLDB 2006 conference.

I bought Season One of the new Battlestar Galactica series.

I’m an old man, so I watched the original. The difference between this new version and the old one is that now, the cylons are machines built by man. In other words, Battlestar Galactica tells the story of AI gone wrong. What if we built intelligence machines, and what if these machines turned against us?

In this new series, the humans are in deep trouble as in the first series. They are trying to escape the ennemy. The ennemy is sneaky and furtive. The cylons have outsmarted the humans and they rarely fight in the open.

Of course, in the post-9/11 era, this is just what we expect. Some might describe the cylons as terrorists. What is interesting is that the humans are responsible for the cylon’s very existence to begin with. The humans must live with the result of their actions. They can hate the cylons, but, to some extend, they can only blame themselves, Also, their own defects are what make the cylons so powerful in the first place: greed and hedonism are what the cylons go after.

I like this story at two levels.

Firstly, this matches exactly what the Americans should experience and what they will eventually come to realize. You can keep polluting, you can keep funding the third world military to secure oil reserves or other goods. But all these actions have consequences. The Americans have created Al Quaida to a large extend by training and funding them initially. Also, the Americans are greedy and that’s their main weakness: building empires is a dangerous and expensive game. But this doesn’t really make me like the show: I’m not looking for a Michael Moore commentary on a Friday night.

However, the AI-is-dangerous component is interesting. I’m not advocating we stop funding AI research: mostly because I do not think we can achieve any form of non-trivial intelligence using current computer technology. However, should we ever close down on hard AI, I believe we should back out. The day my computer will “know” it is a computer will be a dangerous day.

I’m serious about this. If in 20 years from now, we start getting close to hard AI, I will do down to the streets and ask that we stop in our tracks.