Monthly Archives: October, 2012

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot, but he’ll remember, with advantages…

Richard and I have been playing with flash cards as a way of learning things.

The great thing about an electronic implementation of the old ‘question on one side, answer on the other’ idea, is that it can make smart decisions about when and how frequently you should be presented with a particular card. Things you find easy to remember need only occasional repetition, while those which are new or more challenging need more regular viewing until they stick in your memory. When you see the answer, you just say whether or not you got it right, and how hard you found it.

Richard wrote a little while back about using this model to learn a reading he had been asked to give at a wedding. I’ve always liked learning poetry or bits of Shakespeare, but often find that large chunks will flow easily while there are one or two lines I always forget. Could this be the solution?

One of the popular flashcard systems out there is an Open Source one called Anki, created by Damien Elmes. It has Windows, Mac, Linux and Web clients, plus Android and iOS (though these don’t yet work on the latest version). And there are various ways you can get decks of cards in and out. The user interfaces are rather quirky, I find, and even the web sites can be confusing to navigate, but the underlying system works fine.

It’s easy to find plain-text versions online of most things I want to learn, so I wrote a little script called poem2anki which will take a text file containing lines of poetry (or prose!) and convert it into a file suitable for importing into Anki.

A question:

and the answer:

It will create these for all the lines in the poem, but you’ll quickly find you’re only tested on the ones you find difficult to answer.

You can find poem2anki here if wanted.

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Configuring GRUB to boot the right kernel after an upgrade

This is based on a very useful post by a chap named Arie. The credit for much of the following goes to him: I’m just reposting a summary to make it more widely discoverable.

If you upgrade your Linux installation, which on Ubuntu/Debian you might do with something like this:

sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude safe-upgrade

then you may find that your kernel (linux-image package) and GRUB bootloader configuration have been updated. In particular, it may not now, by default, automatically select the right boot menu option when you next reboot… which you’re probably just about to do because you’ve just upgraded everything. This makes some sense because, if the upgrade failed for some reason, you may want to select a different option from the boot menu and go back to the previous kernel.

Well, it makes sense, unless, of course, you aren’t sitting in front of the machine with a screen and keyboard. If you’re upgrading a remote server, you may find that it doesn’t come back up after your reboot. In my case, the server was very remote, and I was lucky to have someone on site to press the right keys.

So, before you reboot after a new kernel installation, you may want to configure GRUB to try the new kernel automatically, and if it fails, go back to the old one.

GRUB is configured by the file /boot/grub/grub.cfg, but on a modern Ubuntu, rather than editing this big and complex file directly, you edit a few settings in /etc/default/grub, and then run update-grub to rebuild it out of lots of separate bits.

So, look at the variables in /etc/default/grub and make sure the following are set:

GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_TIMEOUT=2
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”panic=5″

This tells GRUB to use the last-saved selection, to boot it automatically after 2 seconds, and tells all kernels that they should reboot after 5 seconds if they die completely. Then you need to configure which kernel is initially the one that’s ‘saved’. Set it to be the one you know works. e.g.:

sudo grub-set-default "Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-29-generic"

(You can look at the kernel you’re currently running with uname -a and find the label used to select it in /boot/grub/grub.cfg. Try grep menuentry /boot/grub/grub.cfg, for example.)

Then tell GRUB to try the new kernel on the next reboot, e.g.:

sudo grub-reboot ”Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-32-new”

(This doesn’t actually do the reboot)

Then save all of these things using:

sudo update-grub

And try rebooting.

If it works OK and you come up in the new kernel, set that to be the saved default for the future:

sudo grub-set-default "Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-32-new”

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DNG (Does Not Go)

I shoot almost all my photos in RAW format, which means that my important originals are in a variety of different formats: some Nikon, some Canon, some Panasonic. All of these are proprietary formats (though they’ve generally been reverse-engineered), and so not really ideal for long-term archiving.

It was for this reason that Adobe, some time ago, came up with the DNG — Digital Negative — format: an open standard intended for things like archiving. There are tools for converting most things into DNG, and the idea is that you’ll always be able to get your images out. Some cameras even save DNG as their native format. It’s a very good idea.

In theory.

The problem is that almost none of the tools I use support it. Adobe Lightroom does, of course, and makes it nice and easy to convert images automatically as you import them from your camera. But, once I have my image as a DNG, I find I can’t open it in Aperture, Preview, Acorn or even Photoshop CS3. I don’t get thumbnails in the Finder. I tried reverting to earlier, less efficient versions of the DNG format with fewer fancy options but it still didn’t help, unless you go back to really early variants, which can multiply the file size by three.

I could, of course, view my DNG files in Photoshop if I adopted the standard Adobe solution: pay hundreds of pounds to upgrade a product I paid hundreds of pounds for a little while ago. But I have the latest versions of other software products and none of them can open recent DNGs. Some of it may boil down to insufficient support in Apple’s underlying libraries. Whatever the reason, everything can open the closed, proprietary formats, whereas even Adobe’s DNG Converter can only convert to other forms of DNG. A few special tools like RPP can convert them to TIFFs, as long as you’re not using the latest DNG variants.

I’ve written about this before, but I repeat the experiment periodically to see if things have improved, because I really like the idea of storing things in an open raw format. But, sadly, at present, putting your files into DNG seems to imply locking yourself into expensive Adobe upgrades.

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Meet Tomahawk

It’s not often I’d voluntarily share an advertisement here… but this caught my eye despite my normal banner-ad blindness. I think it’s very nicely done – and hard to ignore!

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HBT

This morning, as I was getting ready for breakfast, I was contemplating what must, surely, be one of the finest phrases in the English language.

Not for its own intrinsic poetry, which I will grant you is minimal, nor indeed for the very pleasant experience it actually describes, but for all the additional images that it conjures up of comfort, safety, return from exciting adventures, and a sense that all is well with the world. Is there any other phrase that so encapsulates these ideals as the simple three words, hot buttered toast?

I think not.

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The grass is always greener

The tactics of queueing, beautifully illustrated in a simple animated GIF:

Seemed appropriate for Status-Q!

Many thanks to Martin Kleppmann for the link.

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Bayeswatch

OK — here's my deep thought for the day. Or it may not be deep, but I haven't finished my first coffee yet…

Is Hume's Maxim simply a restatement of Bayesian Inference?

I'm sure this is not a new idea, but I hadn't made the connection before. Hume's Maxim, which I've always liked, basically states that:

no testimony is sufficient to establish the existence of a miracle, unless it is more likely that the miracle occurred than that the testimony was false.

(I paraphrase slightly. More info here.)

Bayes' Rule is a little more complex, so hang while I just make some more coffee… Ok. Brace yourself. This won't hurt much.

It's the following equation:

where P ( X | Y ) means 'the probability of X given Y'. It’s often written using H and E for hypothesis and evidence.

It says that you can calculate the probability of a hypothesis (say, that a miracle occurred) given some piece of evidence (Mrs Jones reports having seen it).

The probability will depend on three things in the right-hand side of the equation:

  • P(H) – The probability of the miracle itself independent of any reports. (e.g. did the laws of physics change on this particular day for Mrs Jones?)
  • P(E) – The probability that the evidence would present itself independent of anything actually occurring. The combination of possibilities that Mrs Jones was either mistaken, deceived, deluded, fibbing or had some other motivation — possibly a perfectly good one — for coming up with such a report in any case.
  • P(E|H) – The likelihood that Mrs Jones would have reported a miracle, given that it actually occurred. Well, we’re not interested in miracles that happen quietly in the middle of a wood somewhere. We’re talking here about miracles for which there is testimony, so this term is probably 1 or close to it* and so can be removed from the equation in this case. David Hume didn’t include it. It’s worth noting, though, that if people are often abducted by aliens and neglect to mention it, you need to take that into account when they do.

If the likelihood of the laws of physics changing are greater than that Mrs Jones’s report is mistaken – i.e. that P ( H ) is greater than P ( E ) – then the probability that the miracle occurred, given her testimony, is greater than one – i.e. her testimony has established the veracity of the miracle.

So the statements are saying very similar things. Interestingly, they date from about the same period, too – late 18th century – and show an unusual overlap of two magesteria – philosphy and mathematics.

For such a simple equation, Bayes' Rule is incredibly powerful, though its revelations can sometimes be hard to grasp intuitively. You benefit from it every day, though, because it turns out to be phenomenally good, for example, at working out the likelihood that a given piece of email is spam. And a deep understanding of it, combined with a good marketing team, was the foundation of Autonomy, the Cambridge company sold to Hewlett-Packard last year for $10bn.

Sadly, it isn't used often enough for assessing the reliability of conspiracy theories and Daily Mail articles, perhaps because it doesn't tend to stick in one's mind.

So for normal, day-to-day understanding of the world around you, I recommend David Hume's version.

* Update: The probability that I will get statistics correct without help is about the same as the probability that Status-Q’s author is more intelligent than its readers. Thomas points out, quite rightly, that a probability can’t be greater than 1 – something that had been bothering me a bit too! P(E|H) is always less than P(E), so all this is really saying is that the likelihood of a miracle having occurred given Mrs Jones’s report is a bit less than the likelihood of a miracle having occurred. I may be pushing a few things too far: not least my understanding of stats. Hume is talking about the relative values of P(x), not the relationship between them. Can we draw anything more from this? A topic for discussion…!

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Radio Days

Tonight I gave a talk about the Raspberry Pi to the Cambridge and District Amateur Radio Club. I pointed out that I didn't really belong in the group, unless you stretch the word 'Amateur' almost to breaking point, for I know almost nothing about radio.

But I understand the appeal. I made little crystal sets as a child and discovered that the aluminium double-glazing frame in my bedroom was an astonishingly good aerial, provided you wanted to listen to BBC Radio 2. Any other station was likely to be disappointing, but this it received so well that I could almost just connect high-impedance headphones to the frame without any other components. I read, with great jealousy, American novels where the kids had adventures involving walkie-talkies. Many years later, the opening up of CB radio and other bands here in the UK made such things a possibility, but for me, radio was something you received, not transmitted.

On a couple of occasions, visiting a friend or distant family member, I was taken out to a 'shack' in the back garden and allowed to watch and even participate in the strange ritual of starting up shelves of valve–powered equipment, which existed to connect a little speaker and microphone, via an enormous roof-mounted antenna, to people in far-flung parts of the country or even, if atmospheric conditions were right, of the globe.

What I realise now, of course, is what these guys were doing. These were the ones who weren't the passive consumers of radio technology like the rest of us. They had gone to the trouble to amass the equipment and expertise to be allowed to transmit as well as receive. And what were they doing with it?

Late at night, decades before Mr Zuckerberg was even born, they were disappearing into their strange dens to engage in global social networking.

 

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Listening for the word

Since I turned on my Mac’s firewall a few months ago, I get occasional messages which cause me to wonder:

Now, I can understand why Word might want to make outgoing connections, to check for version updates, to print, etc. Anyone know why it would want to be listening on my network? It works just fine if you say no, but I am curious…

The other revealing thing, for me, was that I only saw this message today, which means I haven’t used Microsoft Word for more than four months. This time, as is usually the case, I only need to run it when I’m sent something by a lawyer.

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You’ll believe a frogman can fly…

Oh, boy – I’d love to try one of these. What a great idea! Half-way between jet-ski and jet-pack…

More info here. Many thanks to Simon for the link…

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FreeAgent

Here’s a quick and unsolicited recommendation. When I first set up Telemarq, I was looking for some accounting software that I could use on my Mac, since MYOB, of which I was rather fond, is no longer in existence.

I tried GnuCash, which is free, and now really quite good. I used Ledger for a bit, which is splendid if you’re a geek who likes everything in text files. Both of these gave me a lot of control, but they also swallowed a great deal of my time.

Friends suggested I should look at cloud-based offerings, and after experimenting with a few I came across FreeAgent.

I was, I must admit, rather hesitant about this. As a limited company, albeit a very small one, we needed to pay their top rate of £25/month plus VAT. A total of £360 per year. That’s quite a lot for accounting software in a small company. (If anyone decides to try it as a result of this post, please click this link and you might save me a few pennies!).

In addition, I understood ‘real’ double-entry bookkeeping, and this hid a lot of that behind the scenes, so it couldn’t be a real accounts package, could it?

Well, several months on, I just love it. It saves me a huge amount of time – much more than 30 quid’s worth per month, I suspect – does almost everything I need, and is very UK-oriented (so it tells me when my VAT returns and annual company returns are due). It produces nice invoices and send them to our clients, along with links for electronic payment options if they want to use them. It’s very good at importing my bank statements with minimal manual intervention, it makes submitting VAT returns a breeze, and on the rare occasions when I’ve contacted support, they’ve been very prompt and helpful.

Finally, there’s a good API, and various apps for smartphones which make it really easy to log expenses and timesheets.

There are some things I’d like changed: I wish the pricing was a bit more competitive for small companies, I wish they offered a low-cost ‘personal’ version because I’d like to use it on my own accounts, I’d like a few more options when configuring invoices… but all in all, it comes highly recommended.

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Love and marriage, love and marriage…

…go together like a RaspberryPi and Veroboard…

“The thing people don’t understand about weddings”, said a perceptive friend once, “is that they think it’s ‘the bride’s special day’. When in fact, of course, it’s usually the bride’s mother’s special day. It’s when she gets to create the wedding for her daughter that she wishes she’d had herself. And she’ll be able to remember the details of this one.”

The male equivalent is probably buying a model railway set “for the benefit of your children”. Or, at least, it used to be. Now, of course, geeks of my generation are terribly keen to support the RaspberryPi, “because of all its educational benefits”.

I was thinking about that this morning as I soldered transistors onto Veroboard… for the first time in about 30 years. It’s for the educational benefit of my dog…

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