Space Vixens!
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Tags: mad science, space, the future, toys
SuperSync: avoid.
SuperSync is the most obtuse, confusing and flaky piece of software I have wasted twenty bucks on in recent memory. I wish I had spent that money on eight different iPhone fart apps instead. The UI is completely obtuse. It's a continuous exercise in, "why is that still grayed out??" and "seriously, is there no way to get a list of these differences??" and "CRC error again, you must be shitting me."
Before I'm forced to write my own using rsync and AppleScript, is there an iTunes-synchronization tool that actually works?
Update: Ok, fine, god dammit, I wrote my own.
Tags: computers, firstperson, lazyweb, mac
Dear Apple: iTunes gripes.
Apparently the answer to the question, "do I know anybody who knows anybody who actually works on iTunes" is "no".
So, in case someone reading this does but just doesn't want to admit to it (and again, continuing to assume that the bug system is a black hole for outsiders), here's my list of things about iTunes that drive me crazy on a daily basis.
What follows is, I think, strong evidence that nobody inside Apple actually uses iTunes to watch music videos. I do all the time, so these regressions in iTunes 10 -- for things that worked fine in earlier versions of iTunes -- are really, really irritating.
- No "Sound Check" on music videos. (This is not actually a regression, in that it has never worked, but it's very irritating.) Sound Check works great on MP3, but it is completely ignored for video. Surely it's not rocket science to scan the audio track of a movie in the same way it scans MP3s.
The "Volume Adjustment" slider stopped working on videos in iTunes 10. Since "Sound Check" doesn't work on videos, I wrote an Applescript that determines the peak volume of a video file and frobs the "Volume Adjustment" of each track appropriately. This used to work ok (except that it limited me to adjustments of +/- 6dB, since the slider only goes to +/- 100%) but now it does nothing. (Update: They finally fixed this in iTunes 10.5.)
"Start Time" and "Stop Time" stopped working for music videos in iTunes 10. Videos often have credits at the end that I don't want to sit through. Now, my only option is to edit the file itself instead of just telling iTunes to auto-skip that part.
The video-playback window resizes by itself in iTunes 10. If I'm playing music videos in a window -- not full screen -- the window resizes every time the track changes to a video with a different native resolution. If I've expanded the window to a watchable size, then then every few songs, the window snaps back down to a postage stamp. If consecutive videos are exactly the same size, it leaves the window alone, but as soon as there is a change, it shrinks it to 1:1. In iTunes 9, it would leave the window's size where I left it. This makes iTunes unusable for watching videos in non-full-screen mode.
(Not video related, but) the checkbox next to tracks was removed from "iTunes DJ" in itunes 10. I can change the number of stars on a song from there, but I can't uncheck it! The only way is to bring up the context menu; "Show in playlist Music"; and then uncheck it there.
Tags: computers, firstperson, lazyweb, mac, music
DNA Lounge: Wherein you vote for us in Best of SF!
Is it that time of year again? Yep, it is! Please vote for DNA Lounge, DNA Pizza and our various alumni in this year's SF Weekly Best of San Francisco poll!
Relevant categories include:
7. Best Live Music Venue
15. Best Dance Club
19. Best Club/DJ Party Night
38. Best New Restaurant
42. Best Late-Night Eats
53. Best Pizza
80. Best Bartender
81. Best Drag Queen
Thanks!
Also, photos are up of the Eddie Dane Memorial and the Hubba Hubba "San Francisco" show.
Are you from the Eighties? If so, you should come to Trannyshack tonight to see Stacey Q!
Awesome, iTunes now ignores the "Stop Time" setting on music videos, too.
God dammit!
Do you know anybody who actually works on iTunes? Not "someone who can submit bugs", but "someone who can check in fucking code"?
That's What She Said: Double Entendre Identification
That’s What She Said: Double Entendre Identification
Abstract:
Humor identification is a hard natural language understanding problem. We identify a subproblem — the “that’s what she said” problem — with two distinguishing characteristics: (1) use of nouns that are euphemisms for sexually explicit nouns and (2) structure common in the erotic domain. We address this problem in a classification approach that includes features that model those two characteristics. Experiments on web data demonstrate that our approach improves precision by 12% over baseline techniques that use only word-based features.
1 Introduction:
[...] To our knowledge, related research has not studied the task of identifying double entendres in text or speech. The task is complex and would require both deep semantic and cultural understanding to recognize the vast array of double entendres. We focus on a subtask of double entendre identification: TWSS recognition. We say a sentence is a TWSS if it is funny to follow that sentence with “that’s what she said”. We frame the problem of TWSS recognition as a type of metaphor identification.
We define three functions to measure how closely related a noun, an adjective, and a verb phrase are to the erotica domain.
1. The noun sexiness function NS(n) is a real-valued measure of the maximum similarity a noun n ∈/ SN has to each of the nouns ∈ SN−. For each noun, let the adjective count vector be the vector of the absolute frequencies of each adjective that modifies the noun in the union of the erotica and the Brown corpora. We define NS(n) to be the maximum cosine similarity, over each noun ∈ SN−, using term frequency-inverse document frequency (tf-idf) weights of the nouns’ adjective count vectors. [...] Example nouns with high NS are “rod” and “meat”.
2. The adjective sexiness function AS(a) is a real-valued measure of how likely an adjective a is to modify a noun ∈ SN. We define AS(a) to be the relative frequency of a in sentences in the erotica corpus that contain at least one noun ∈ SN. Example adjectives with high AS are “hot” and “wet”.
Tags: mad science, perversions, the future
Well, iTunes has fucked up music video playback again.
Now iTunes not only ignores "Sound Check" when playing videos, but now it also ignores the "Volume Adjustment" slider in "Get Info" on video tracks.
So you can no longer even normalize the volume manually.
I'm not sure when they broke this, but it was relatively recently.
This is just fantastic.
Tags: firstperson, mac, movies, music
