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• Methods For Retaining State

  26 décembre 2011, par Multimedia Mike — General, evernote, organization

  I jump around between projects. A lot. Over the years, I have employed various methods for retaining state or context as I switch to a different project. Here’s a quick survey and a general classification of their effectiveness.

  Good

  • Evernote : This is a cloud-based note-taking service that has a web client, Mac and Windows clients, and clients for just about ever mobile platform out there. I have an account and access it via the web interface as as the Windows, iOS, and Android clients. I really like it.

  
  
  

  Okay

  • Series of text files : I have been doing this for a very long time. I have many little note-filled directories here and there that are consistently migrated to new machines but generally forgotten about. This isn’t a terrible method but can be unwieldy when you work on lots of different machines. I’m still tracking down all these directories and importing them into Evernote.

  Bad

  • Layout of desktop windows : I have a habit of working on one project in a set of windows on one desktop space and another project in a second set of windows in another space, etc. Oh, this makes me shudder just thinking about it, mostly because of living in constant fear of a power failure or some other inadvertent reset (darn you, default config’d Windows Update) that wipes the state clean (sure, all of the work might have been saved, but I was relying on those windows to be set up in just the right manner to remind me of all the things I was working on). These days, I force myself to reboot at least once a week so I can’t get too deep into this habit. When it’s time to change projects, I write up exactly what I was doing and where I left off and stick it in Evernote.
  • Open browser windows : I guess it’s common to have many, many tabs open in one’s web browser in this day and age. Like many, I use open tabs as a stack of items to read. The state problem comes when a few of the open tabs represent TODO items. Then I start living in fear that the browser might crash or be restarted in an unexpected way and I struggle to recall what 3-5 important TODO items were that I had opened in separate tabs (on top of a stack of less important items). Again, I try to shut down the browser frequently in order to break this tendency. TODO items are better filed in Evernote.
  • Unsaved data in a text editor : Okay, this is just sloppy on my part, shoving temporary data into a text editor window thinking it’s supremely ephemeral. The problem comes when it’s linked to one of the many tasks on my desktop that might be bumped down a few priority levels ; when finally returning to the context-free data, I’m at a loss to explain what it’s for. Evernote gets it, once more, with a more thorough description of what was going on.
  • Email inbox : I make an effort to ensure that my email inbox has the fewest number of messages possible. Once things are dealt with, they get filed away elsewhere. This implies that things in my inbox require action. Some things have a habit of hanging around, though. Longer items now get described in better detail and filed away in Evernote.
  • Classic paper : Thanks to Derek in the comments for reminding me of this one. Paper is a reliable standby but it can get unwieldy when Post-It Notes litter your work area. Further, it can be problematic when you have multiple physical work areas.
  • Shell history : Another method I rely on entirely too often. This is when I count on a recipe of command line incantations living on in the history buffer of my Unix shell (generally Bash). What sequence of git commands allowed me to do XYZ ? Let’s check the shell history– I sure hope it’s still in there.

  Conclusion
  I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I really like Evernote. If you have similar troubles with retaining state, try it out. I hear there are many other services similar to it with slightly varying feature sets (people rave about Microsoft OneNote). So there are plenty of options and something out there is surely a fit.

  Evernote has a free tier and a premium tier. For my meager note-taking needs, I don’t come anywhere close to the free tier’s limit but I decided to pay for a premium subscription simply because I feel like I derive so much value from the service.

  One downside, however, is that I seem to be doing a lot less blogging since I got on Evernote earlier this year (though it is where I author most of these posts nowadays ; I especially like that I have a notebook labeled “Posted” whose incrementing count reminds me that I am getting some stuff out there). I originally started this blog as a sort of technical journal in order to organize notes and projects in a central location. It’s strange to think that if Evernote existed in 2005, I might never have had a reason to start this blog.

• How to greatly reduce video size before downloading while maintaining good quality ? [closed]

  25 septembre 2017, par Momin Shaikh

  I need to download huge files from YouTube with my android phone.. need to download a lot of 360p videos for my study purposes but living in a 3rd country like Bangladesh where bandwidth costs is super high forcing me to afford less data. So, I am looking for a way to greatly reduce file size still maintaining good quality.

  I know that converting videos to x265 or HEVC format reduces video sizes as well as keeping the good quality keeping . But i think that can not be done online.. Is there any way to just reduce file size without reducing the quality ?

• Re-solving My Search Engine Problem

  28 juillet 2012, par Multimedia Mike — General, swish-e

  14 years ago, I created a web database of 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System games. To make it useful, I developed a very primitive search feature.

  A few months ago, I decided to create a web database of video game music. To make it useful, I knew it would need to have a search feature. I realized I needed to solve the exact same problem again.

  Requirements
  The last time I solved this problem, I came up with an excruciatingly naïve idea. Hey, it worked. I really didn’t want to deploy the same solution again because it felt so silly the first time. Surely there are many better ways to solve it now ? Many different workable software solutions that do all the hard work for me ?

  The first time I attacked this, it was 1998 and hosting resources were scarce. On my primary web host I was able to put static HTML pages, perhaps with server side includes. The web host also offered dynamic scripting capabilities via something called htmlscript (a.k.a. MIVA Script). I had a secondary web host in my ISP which allowed me to host conventional CGI scripts on a Unix host, so that’s where I hosted the search function (Perl CGI script accessing a key/value data store file).

  Nowadays, sky’s the limit. Any type of technology you want to deploy should be tractable. Still, a key requirement was that I didn’t want to pay for additional hosting resources for this silly little side project. That leaves me with options that my current shared web hosting plan allows, which includes such advanced features as PHP, Perl and Python scripts. I can also access MySQL.

  Candidates
  There are a lot of mature software packages out there which can index and search data and be plugged into a website. But a lot of them would be unworkable on my web hosting plan due to language or library package limitations. Further, a lot of them feel like overkill. At the most basic level, all I really want to do is map a series of video game titles to URLs in a website.

  Based on my research, Lucene seems to hold a fair amount of mindshare as an open source indexing and search solution. But I was unsure of my ability to run it on my hosting plan. I think MySQL does some kind of full text search, so I could have probably made a solution around that. Again, it just feels like way more power than I need for this project.

  I used Swish-e once about 3 years ago for a little project. I wasn’t confident of my ability to run that on my server either. It has a Perl API but it requires custom modules.

  My quest for a search solution grew deep enough that I started perusing a textbook on information retrieval techniques in preparation for possibly writing my own solution from scratch. However, in doing so, I figured out how I might subvert an existing solution to do what I want.

  Back to Swish-e
  Again, all I wanted to do was pull data out of a database and map that data to a URL in a website. Reading the Swish-e documentation, I learned that the software supports a mode specifically tailored for this. Rather than asking Swish-e to index a series of document files living on disk, you can specify a script for Swish-e to run and the script will generate what appears to be a set of phantom documents for Swish-e to index.
  

  When I ’add’ a game music file to the game music website, I have a scripts that scrape the metadata (game title, system, song titles, composers, company, copyright, the original file name on disk, even the ripper/dumper who extracted the chiptune in the first place) and store it all in an SQLite database. When it’s time to update the database, another script systematically generates a series of pseudo-documents that spell out the metadata for each game and prefix each document with a path name. Searching for a term in the index returns a lists of paths that contain the search term. Thus, it makes sense for that path to be a site URL.

  But what about a web script which can search this Swish-e index ? That’s when I noticed Swish-e’s C API and came up with a crazy idea : Write the CGI script directly in C. It feels like sheer madness (or at least the height of software insecurity) to write a CGI script directly in C in this day and age. But it works (with the help of cgic for input processing), just as long as I statically link the search script with libswish-e.a (and libz.a). The web host is an x86 machine, after all.

  I’m not proud of what I did here— I’m proud of how little I had to do here. The searching CGI script is all of about 30 lines of C code. The one annoyance I experienced while writing it is that I had to consult the Swish-e source code to learn how to get my search results (the "swishdocpath" key — or any other key — for SwishResultPropertyStr() is not documented). Also, the C program just does the simplest job possible, only querying the term in the index and returning the results in plaintext, in order of relevance, to the client-side JavaScript code which requested them. JavaScript gets the job of sorting and grouping the results for presentation.

  Tuning the Search
  Almost immediately, I noticed that the search engine could not find one of my favorite SNES games, U.N. Squadron. That’s because all of its associated metadata names Area 88, the game’s original title. Thus, I had to modify the metadata database to allow attaching somewhat free-form tags to games in order to compensate. In this case, an alias title would show up in the game’s pseudo-document.

  Roman numerals are still a thorn in my side, just as they were 14 years ago in my original iteration. I dealt with it back then by converting all numbers to Roman numerals during the index and searching processes. I’m not willing to do that for this case and I’m still looking for a good solution.

  Another annoying problem deals with Mega Man, a popular franchise. The proper spelling is 2 words but it’s common for people to mash it into one word, Megaman (see also : Spider-Man, Spiderman, Spider Man). The index doesn’t gracefully deal with that and I have some hacks in place to cope for the time being.

  Positive Results
  I’m pleased with the results so far, and so are the users I have heard from. I know one user expressed amazement that a search for Castlevania turned up Akumajou Densetsu, the Japanese version of Castlevania III : Dracula’s Curse. This didn’t surprise me because I manually added a hint for that mapping. (BTW, if you are a fan of Castlevania III, definitely check out the Akumajou Densetsu soundtrack which has an upgraded version of the same soundtrack using special audio channels.)

  I was a little more surprised when a user announced that searching for ’probotector’ correctly turned up Contra : Hard Corps. I looked into why this was. It turns out that the original chiptune filename was extremely descriptive : "Contra - Hard Corps [Probotector] (1994-08-08)(Konami)". The filenames themselves often carry a bunch of useful metadata which is why it’s important to index those as well.

  And of course, many rippers, dumpers, and taggers have labored for over a decade to lovingly tag these songs with as much composer information as possible, which all gets indexed. The search engine gets a lot of compliments for its ability to find many songs written by favorite composers.