left behind III

I didn't like the movie. I went to see it in its debut last Friday with the Church's Youth group. What an American bias to the whole idea of world! Jez! The UN is the Devil, and will be there to persecute the (american) christians. Jez! And the Devil speaks Russian! And the Chinese are in the Axil of Evil! Oh boy, that's bad, very bad. The scene where they show the poison being sprinkled over the Bibles is just ridiculous. At the end, I didn't get why there was war. Of course there needs to be war and terror. The movie plays with the feelings of insecurity in the minds of the american christians to manipulate them in their world-view. I just don't see the point in discussing and showing terror 'in the future', as if there were no terror here and now. Just look at children dying of AIDS/HIV daily. That's terror. That's the true Left Behind that the american christians don't want to see.

Humdrum using Cygwin

I'm very impressed with Humdrum. It seems to be a nice software created by musicians for musical analysis! It seems that again no 'computer scientist' was excited to give a hand to the project. I suspect that because the installation and documentation are somewhat obscure. Here is how one can install Humdrum using Cygwin:
1- change 'uncompress' to 'gunzip -d' in humunix
3- create an empty .profile file somewhere - say /thesis/humdrum1.0/
2- do an install.ksh linux
4- change .profile to be something like
export TMPDIR; TMPDIR=/tmp
export HUMDRUM; HUMDRUM=/thesis/humdrum1i
export AWK_VER; AWK_VER=awk
export CON; CON=/thesis/humdrum1.0/error
PATH=/thesis/humdrum1i/bin:$PATH

( replace proper path to humdrum )
Notice that CON points to a file called error (you have to create this file)

5 - issue make commands separately for each subdirectory under csource.
6- for each command above, copy the executable to the bin directory
7- copy all executables in csource.dos to the bin directory.

I couldn't get MIDI and perform to work yet... You may find some other problems here and there. The procedure above hasn't been fully tested.

Trocando uma torneira que pinga

Fui consertar uma torneira que pinga hoje. Que coisa! Essas instruções de engenheiros são muito complicadas. Empaquei na estapa de tirar o cartucho de dentro da torneira. O negócio não saía, e acabei quebrando uma parte de acrílico do próprio cartucho. No final das contas, com muita força, consegui tirar o negócio. Moen é o nome do fabricante. Que instruções ruins! Não tinha texto nenhum, e as figuras de uns 4 tipos de torneiras não batiam com a que eu tinha.

MuseData is online

MuseData is online. I only had to log in. It would be much better if the site told me that I had to log in to have access to the music, instead of just giving a 404 error. No wonder 'regular' people hate computers.

MuseData is offline

MuseData (http://www.musedata.org) is one of the only two music databases that contains music for analysis. And now it's not working. Trying to get a file gives an HTTP 404 error. URLs just shouldn't be changed. They point to things on the Internet, and HTTP 404 is a bad error.

Java is Spanish, C++ Portuguese

Java is Spanish, C++ Portuguese. Do I get confused with both (or the 4)?! As someone said, Portuguese is not that important anyways... It's only more convenient to speak Portuguese if you were born listening to it.

University of Ottawa

If you are looking for a University to persue your graduate studies in Canada, don't choose the University of Ottawa. I haven't had any support from it. I have no funding as a part-time student. The only request for travel that I had was denied because I wasn't a full-time student. I ended up paying to go to the conference in Europe out of my own pocket (ouch). My supervisor quit the university and went to Laval. He was very honest saying that the University here didn't have fair ways to evaluate the professor's performance. The Director of the Faculty of Computer Science was kind enough not to reply to my request to take credit for a course I took before formally registering in the program. Then this same director rejected my thesis title, saying that I had to have a supervisor locally from the University, despite the fact that my supervisor was still an adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa.

SVMlight and research community

This SVM-Light implementation for Support Vector Machines is complicated. First, the kernel function again expects a codomain in the real field. I wish that was generalized to commutative rings, like integers.
And the "research community" is a strange thing. They seem to be isolated in their own world. I remember asking for simple help and collaboration from more than one 'researcher', and got no reply. I asked the University of Ottawa for funding to travel to a conference, and it wasn't granted to non-full-time students. As if part-time students had money to go to conferences. I see these papers that talk, talk and don't mean much. I really wonder where are the so-called research grants.

Discrete SVMs

I think that there is the possibility of defining discrete Support Vector Machines.
It's unfortunate that all SVM theory as I read it assumes that the codomain of the kernel function
is the Eucludean space. Although the theory will often say that the input space can be any countable set, the examples and implementations seem to assume too often that you got R as your input space. And why not use a free module instead of a vector space? It seems to me that all of this can be generalized to allow for discrete spaces. That would be interesting! Maybe someone in the future will be able to define the musical structures in algebraic terms, or using a topology, and then allow a machine to operate directly on the music pieces. Not allowing the use of discrete spaces for me restricts the applicability of the SVM theory to other inputs that are countable in ways other than the field of the reals.

taxonomy instead of DNS

Is it possible to have a directory service based on a taxonomy instead of DNS? It would be interesting for the Internet to have a service that allows one to make a query based on a hierarchical taxonomy. I think that we could redesign the DNS service to be based on a taxonomy. The implementation would be much more elegant. And perhaps, a semantic web service would be able to make new derivations on the fly and provide an intelligent directory service. That would interesting.