Visualizing sound - Cymatics

First time I've ever heard of cymatics and I am intrigued. basically you use some (physical) devices to visualize soundwaves. Here is a small TED presentation about it:



My question is simple: can this be used to "understand" sounds for deaf people or are the pattern transitions too complex? googling for cymatics I've found a lot of videos about water and cornstarch moved by sound and links to "sound healing" and even some technical papers that never seem to have left academia. I think this could be interesting enough to emulate on a computer, yet I have not found code for it yet.

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Video Lan Player 1.0.1 buggy streaming over the web from command line

This is mostly a rant, but also it should help people trying to do this as well to stop trying until there is some sort of solution from the VLC side.

I was trying to see how a web cam can be streamed over the web using VLC, a software that otherwise am very satisfied with as a video player. Recently they did a 1.0.0 version, which is quite something for free software that comes from the Linux world; usually they are 0.8 something and with a lot of alpha-beta-zeta afterward. So, as I was saying, recently VLC jumped from the 0.9.x version to 1.0.0, with a much more user friendly user interface and (at least so it seems to me) less adaptability than before. What I mean is that, in extreme cases, it throws errors that previous versions were able to circumvent, like when using partial or damaged video files. Also, it crashes on some older videos as well and I am forced to use the ancient (but sturdy) mplayer.

Back to business, I read the comprehensive command line help file that is almost 250k long, found what I was looking for, then tried. No success. I really felt like an idiot, as it wouldn't work whatever I did. In the end I just gave up and tried to start the streaming from the GUI, not from the command line. IT WORKED! Copying the exact command line parameters that the GUI would generate did not work. Saving the WORKING streaming to a playlist and then loading the playlist DID NOT WORK.

Here I have to say two things: when I say that it worked, it means that I had to fight it to be able to stream what I wanted and not HOW I wanted. Basically, the streaming will not work AT ALL if transcoding is not activated, which I personally think it makes it unusable anyway.

So, bottom line is that if you are trying to use VLC 1.0 from the command line, you are pretty much screwed. At least the flag that I was interested in (--dshow-vdev) would not select my web cam if its life depended on it. And it sort of did. Not likely I will use VLC in my business application.

I've even tried to go to one of those old style PHP forums that they have on the Videolan site. I waited for half an hour to receive the registration email and at that time I had given up completely. They had like 60.000 messages on the forums anyway and I doubt I would have gotten a reply any more intelligent than the usual RTFM. Yeah, I know, I sound very Linux unfriendly, but actually I am not, I've worked on Linux quite some time. What I am not friendly towards are the borderline psychotic assholes that only answer when they have nothing to actually say to help.

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Making content not resize with its container in WPF

I believe this is something that any decent WPF programmer will laugh about, but there it is: I had this control derived from ContentControl and, of course, somewhere in the template I had a ContentPresenter. It all worked very well until I added a resizable option. I had two of these controls on the page, the first would contain a Grid, the other an ItemsControl. When I resized vertically the control, the ItemsControl would remain unchanged whether I made the height bigger or smaller. The Grid, though, would remain the same if enlarging the container and then squash when the size of the container got smaller than its auto size.

I have to say that I think my solution is really silly, but since it works: I've put a ScrollViewer control around the ContentPresenter in the my control template and then set its VerticalScrollBarVisibility to Hidden. This more or less is the same thing as setting overflow:hidden on the web.

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Visual Studio external build commands weirdness

Short (but true) story: I was compiling this solution with a lot of projects in it. And one of these projects had some post-build events set to run which copied the resulting dll in an Assemblies folder. Only it failed.

On building the project I was getting an error: The command "[Complete command]" exited with code 1.

What was weird about it is that if I copied the command in a batch file and ran it, it would work perfectly. After trying a zillion things I've stumbled upon the condition of build events Run the post-build event: which was set to On successful build. I set it to Always and voila, it worked.

But I still needed to know what was going on, especially since it would make no sense to run the copy command if the build has failed. So I switched it back to On successful build. Surprize! It also worked.

Therefore, the silly solution for a problem that doesn't make much sense is to switch to always run the build events, build successfully, then switch back and build again. Fun!

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Absolution Gap by Alastair Reynolds

The fourth book by Alastair Reynolds that I've read recently, also set in the Revelation Space world, Absolution Gap follows the adventures of the ship Nostalgia for Infinity as it flees the "culling" of the Delta Pavonis star system by the swarm like machines called the Inhibitors. There is no purpose in reading the book without the others, as the story starts where it had left and continues to a more or less open ending.

This felt like the best book so far, however the enjoyment that I got from it had its very brutal ups and downs. While the beginning starts with full force and made me want to not let go of the book until I finish it, there was a side story that seemed not to have any connection with the main arc. When they finally met, they left me with that "What the fuck?" feeling. The ending was a jiggly up and down ranging from very cool and completely dumb. Not that the writing style faltered, but the behaviour of some of the characters really annoyed the crap out of me.

I would have to say that the ending was the most anticlimactic of all the books in the series, but the book is definitely the best yet.

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I have extra 16px width or height in my web page!

Usually this happends in IE, but it may happen in a various other situations, given that Internet Explorer is famously bad, but also has to fight with all the backward compatibility and that new "innovative" browsers are on the way.

Let me make this easy: if it's a weird sixteen pixels difference (or somewhere around 16) then you probably are in one of these situations:

• scrollbars - that you may not see, but they are there. I've just met this issue with a table of 100 percent width placed in a div of 100 percent width and it happened in IE8!
• line-height - this is usually with Internet Explorer 6 or less, divs that are 16px in height when they have no content and have a specified lower height
• font-size - also something from the older browsers

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31 Days of Refactoring via LosTechies

Nothing interesting to say myself, so I am linking to random blog posts :) Here is one that describes 31 types of refactoring, with examples and everything:

31 Days of Refactoring.

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