Name: Scrambled Text?
Member since: 2005-01-14 23:43:36
Last Login: 2017-06-23 00:18:13
Notes:
This bit didn't come back when I recreated my account after the Advogato glitch.
I am a Yoorpean currently working for a medium-small biotech company in the San Francisco Bay area. After getting my Ph.D. in Yoorp I was a fellow at the National Cancer Institute, a postdoc at UCSF and an investigator at a health science company in the Chicago area. I don't know where life will lead me next.
I am not a computer professional but have been hooked on them since exposure to the school's Commodore PET (1979). I prefer UNIX-like OSs and have used Linux in some shape or form since Slackware 2.0 in June 1994 (kernel 1.0.9). In addition to Intel boxes at home and work I also have a Sun Ultra 5. All run Debian.
It seems that youngsters a third of my age seem to be able to memorise this and type it in without thinking, but I need this put somewhere my lazy neurons can find it.
vlc -vvv "input.flv" --no-sout-video --play-and-exit --sout="#transcode{acodec=mp3,ab=320,channels=2}:std{access=file,mux=raw,dst="output.mp3}"
...and don't forget to double-check that VLC has write permission for the target directory (it is very cautious). Yes yes yes, should be Linux, should be ogg etc. etc. but sometimes my hands are tied.
I am glad to see that Pedro is also having fun with R. There are, however, times when it drives me crazy. For example, carrying out simple linear regression, then using the result to predict a value. Note that in the code below I have replaced my preferred assignment operator (less_than + hyphen) with Pascal's := because Advogato doesn't like stray angle brackets, so rewrite it if you want to run the code;
# Let's create some x and y values
xlist := c(1:5);
ylist := c(0.9, 2.1, 3.2, 4.3, 5.1);
# Now simple linear regression
regobject := lm(ylist ~ xlist, data=data.frame(cbind(xlist, ylist)));
If I look at the contents of regobject then all is well. However, now for the prediction. In a sane world this should be as simple as;
predict(regobject, newdata=testvalue);
Where testvalue has the x-value to be used in the prediction. Unfortunately R fails worse than silently as it just provides the predicted values for everything in xlist. Okay, maybe I need to coerce the value into a data frame.
predict(regobject, newdata=data.frame(testvalue));
Nope. It needs a data frame with a column with the same name as that used to generate the regression object. I have not seen that written explicitly in any book or help file. Thankfully a few other folk have ranted about this so there are explanations out there.
predict(regobject, newdata=data.frame(xlist=testvalue));
Woohoo! So now,
predict(regobject, newdata=data.frame(xlist=2.5));
gives me the predicted y-value for x=2.5 (y=2.59). My guess is that being an R programmer is now so lucrative that documentation is written in an obscure (but factually correct) manner deliberately. Prepare for this blog entry to receive a takedown notice :-)
nutella certified others as follows:
Others have certified nutella as follows:
[ Certification disabled because you're not logged in. ]
New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.
Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.
If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!