Friday, May 8, 2009

free online baseball

just found this great site that links to online sports radio stations that broadcast baseball games: http://www.freebaseballradio.com/ and with the magic of mplayer, i can time-shift redsox games (my personal audio recorder) mplayer -dumpstream -dumpfile redsox-2009-05-07.asf mms://wm-live.abacast.com/northeast_broadcasting-wfad-32

Thursday, May 7, 2009

probabilistic planning

apparently some people have addressed the problem of non-deterministic project planning. deltek risk+ is an add-on for ms project that handles pdfs for task duration. liquidplanner is web-based planning + groupware for $25 to $35/mo/user (free for nonprofit/educational). looks like it handles duration intervals (with uniform pdfs?) and computes probabilities for meeting deadlines. maybe i should check out their training/demo videos and 30 day free trial. pertmaster adds monte carlo to the primavera (bought by oracle?) planning software. i've seen a couple of web rants about this subject, and the liquid planner people say this is their reason for existance. i should give them a shot before doing my own. at the least i will learn from it, and maybe i can save myself the trouble (though i still want the probabilistic success/fail with alternative tasks). if i do write my own mc code, hooking into openproj, i think i can use mpxj.sf.net. it's the lib used by openproj to read/write ms project xml files, and it will let me interface (mostly) at the input file level. also, i looked at the files in all the .jars that come with openproj. it looks like what i need to get the computed summary task/project duration will be in openproj-1.4/openproj.jar

recording from the mic

here's a handy one-liner script that lets me record from the mic in. #!/bin/env bash rawrec -t 18000 -s 8000 -f s8 -c 1 -v $@ then i can compress it losslessly with this: flac -V --best --endian=little --sign=signed --channels=1 --bps=8 --sample-rate=8000 --lax out4.raw -o out4.flac and decode with this: flac -dec out4.flac -o out4.wav