Topics - suleika [ switch to compact view ]

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I'm having trouble finding a tool for some basic data analysis.  I want to input discrete lists of items, which will have some overlap between the lists, and then, for any given item, browse its associations (the frequency of list-fellows).  My data won't be very extensive - roughly in the order of 30-50 lists of 20-40 items each. 

An example of the kind of analysis I need (not what I will be using it for) would be lists of cities visited by my friends.  Each friend has a list containing the names of the cities they have visited.  The minimum analysis I would require is that when browsing "Paris" I would be able to see associated cities in order of frequency, and also the names of which friends have visited. 

Further useful information would be about similarity between lists, and an indication of which lists are the more unusual/original and which most "average".  Also, bearing in mind list similarities, which cities tend to be indicators of averageness or originality.

I don't mind if it's not visually represented, though that would be a bonus.

All I've managed to find is expensive software like TouchGraph Navigator and bewildering toolkits like Prefuse.  I keep thinking I must be missing something.  Perhaps language analysis software?  Some clever Excel trick?

2
There are lots of countdown timer programs around but when I saw a post on Mark Forster's site about the Time Timer clocks and watches I realised how useful a quick glance visualisation would be when working at my computer. 

TimeTimer.jpg

And then I thought of how it might work.  On my pocket PC I use a little program called batti to display battery status in a colourful bar at the very top of the screen - as small as 1 pixel (I have it set to 2).

Batti.gif

So how about a countdown timer for windows which would display the countdown in a thin docked bar/strip at the edge of the screen or by the taskbar?

At its most simple, the total length of the bar would be the total time set and block colouring would give a rough idea of time elapsed. But ideally there would be a way to mark the bar like a tape measure, so you could read 23 minutes passed out of 60 minutes, for example, or 3 min 10 seconds out of 5 minutes.  If the bar were not too thin, it could even have numbers on it.  And it would be very cool to be able to have more than one timer going at once, with some way of distinguishing them.

Does that all make sense?   Does anyone think it could be done?

3
I'm running Firefox3.0b5 in safe mode, thinking that it might be my webdeveloper bar or something like that, but the forum still has this weird red background and no-one's said anything!  I'm a little bit paranoid because I also have something weird going on on Flickr (three of my thumbnails - the square ones - are showing up as a different picture) which also started last night.

I've checked my processes (using procexp) but can't see anything unusual going on - but perhaps this forum is now supposed to be red?

Screenshot - 06_05_2008 , 02_16_06_cr.jpg

Ah - the penny dropped as soon as I posted this - I cleared my cache (which does not happen automatically in Firefox safe mode) and everything is back to normal on both sites. 

That was strange though!

4
I have not one but two digicams now and I'm really getting into it as a hobby, and I'm doing quite well at organising the photos I work on, but the ones I don't work on are a bit of a mess and are taking up a lot of space.  Some of them I want to keep intact for working on in the future, and the rest I want to save as smaller jpg files (for reference, memento etc) and delete the originals.  A few of them I'm going to process by hand, but most of them could be batch processed.

Most of the originals are jpgs of (approx) either 3000x2000 and 1.5-3.5 MB, or 4200x3400 and 1.5 -5 MB.  (I'm not doing anything with my RAW files yet.)  I've tested quite a few and I've worked out that I'd like to make the files 1 MB but have them no smaller than 1000 pixels on the shorter side.  This won't be a one-off job; I'll be doing this every time I shoot.

I'm trying very hard to satisfice here rather than optimise - these photos are rejects, after all (I mainly want to be able to see why I rejected them, refer to the EXIF data, and also to keep a chronology alongside the photos I am keeping).  But the files vary in size quite a lot - and so if I use FastStone Image Viewer, for example, and set the shorter side at 1000 pixels, and set the jpg quality to give me an average file size of 1MB, I end up with quite a lot of files considerably smaller and larger than 1MB (and the setting would be different from batch to batch anyway).

Is there a smart way of doing this?  Does anyone know of a program that will deliver a file 1000 pixels short-side at 100% quality, unless result is more than 1MB, in which case try 99%, unless result is more than 1MB, in which case try 98%, etc etc?

Alternatively, is there a program that will simply reduce the quality of the jpg to a given file size (1MB) without resizing?  And can anyone tell me how different the result will be from a re-sized file (new dimensions) in terms of quality?  I would have thought it would be much the same when viewed at the same size on the screen.

I'm aware, by the way, that if I were to use a percentage as the quality setting then the resultant files would have a neatly consistent relationship to their originals, but I don't want to go that route, even though it would be easier to manage.  Firstly, the originals with smaller file sizes are the ones to benefit from not being over-compressed and the byte-rich files can afford it.  Secondly, if I can get the files near to 1MB each it will make accounting for future file storage extremely easy.


5
I'm giving Firefox 3 Beta 5 a try, and yet again I find myself frustrated with the layout and interface of the Firefox Add-on site.  There seems no way to search for extension by compatibility except by guessing at search strings, and there is not much consistency in how the Firefox versions are mentioned in the descriptions.  This used to frustrate me already with Firefox2 every time there was a major update.

When browsing the site with Firefox 3.0b5 any compatible extensions show up with a green download button rather than grey, which enabled me to scan the pages 100 extensions at at time and find the compatible ones reasonably fast.  But having done that once, I'd love to be notified when any extensions are updated.  I can't find any rss feeds though.  Would this be something a website watcher could help me with?

But surely the actual interface to the database could be improved in the first place.  It's maddening.  Firefox itself can obviously distinguish between compatible and non-compatible just through the browser window (as oppose to via a tool) which makes me wonder if the relevant info can be found in the metadata of the rendered html somewhere.  I wonder if that's the kind of thing a greasemonkey script could ferret out, like the scripts people have written for Flickr.  (Mind you, greasemonkey is not yet 3.0b5 compatible.)

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