fôxglove

sometimes at work when futzing around with signal processing stuff, i have to dump signals to disk and listen to them, to make sure some operation is doing what i think it is.

the other day i needed to compare two audio signals to make sure they were the same. they SOUNDED the same, but i needed some way of "diffing" them to be sure, and we don't really have any fancy sound editing tools where i work.

but i had photoshop! so i loaded the first 135 seconds of "still a g-thang" by snoop dogg (hey, we don't get to pick and choose what we test with) as raw pcm data:



and here's the signal i needed to compare it to:



and here's what happened when i overlayed them, shifted one over slightly to account for a different offset in the buffer, and then set the top layer to difference:



voila! just a tiny bit of noise attributable to one signal being mp3 encoded and the other AAC, but the signals were basically the same. proof that the bug i was trying to fix was upstream (not in my code, BITCHES!)

then, out of curiosity, i saved the image as a JPEG, then decompressed it back to raw and listened to it. here's what snoop dogg sounds like when you compress him with your EYES instead of your EARS, MAAAAAN (wooaaaaaah, groovy)!

( Collapse )

   _
  //\
  V  \
   \  \_
    \,'.`-.
     |\ `. `.       
     ( \  `. `-.                        _,.-:\
      \ \   `.  `-._             __..--' ,-';/
       \ `.   `-.   `-..___..---'   _.--' ,'/
        `. `.    `-._        __..--'    ,' /
          `. `-_     ``--..''       _.-' ,'
            `-_ `-.___        __,--'   ,'
               `-.__  `----"""    __.-'
                    `--..____..--'
 

listen.

playing with ( Collapse )

there was an article in the paper today about new labor laws in australia. there was political pandering and use of the word "whinging" to describe union representatives. typical government/media stuff. there was some protesting, but no blowing up cars like france.

my first overgeneralized and completely uninformed reaction to the idea of labor laws and unions is that they're dumb. i don't understand fighting en masse to remain employed by someone who treats you poorly. i think anyone should be able to be fired at any time. but this comes with lots of utopia caveats:

i think the role of companies in modern society is dumb. i think companies having a natural lifecycle is perfectly fine, just like how british tv shows only run for a season or two.

i think the role of employees in companies is dumb. there shouldn't be an idea of vestment, or job security, nor should there be such a stigma attached to getting fired.

i think the idea of tying one's work/productive efforts in society to having a means to subsist and survive is dumb. they should be separate things. you should get money because you work. you should get food and shelter cause you're a human.

good sense is of all things in the world the most equally distributed, for everybody thinks himself so abundantly provided with it, that even those most difficult to please in all other matters do not commonly desire more of it than they already possess. it is unlikely that this is an error on their part; it seems rather to be evidence in support of the view that the power of forming a good judgement and of distinguishing the true from the false, which is properly speaking what is called good sense or reason, is by nature equal in all men. hence too it will show that the diversity of our opinions does not proceed from some men being more rational than others, but solely from the fact that our thoughts pass through diverse channels and the same objects are not considered by all.

- first lines from discourse on the method by descartes

hobart from the top of mt. wellington.