I recently upgraded my D800 to Ubuntu Hardy. Things seem to be working fine. Looking through the packages available I saw that I could get sensors-applet to monitor internal temperature sensors. This showed that my GPU was running near 75 degrees C.The nvidia-settings tool showed I was running at Performance Level 2 and appeared to be stuck there. I searched a bit and found other people looking for the same info and got a few hints. After some fooling around I found the following commands would cool things off. They may reduce performance but I don’t need it.

nvidia-settings --assign="GPUOverclockingState=1"
nvidia-settings --assign="GPU2DClockFreqs=100,230"
nvidia-settings --assign="GPU2DClockFreqs=100,230"

Yes, I know that I’m setting the 2D Clock Freqs twice. The first time seems to move it to Performance Level 1 and the second time drops it to level 0 where I want to be. I got the numbers from the nvidia-settings on the Power Mizer tab.

I put those commands in a script and run it using the Sessions facility I found at System->Preferences->Sessions.

From: http://fp.enter.net/~rburk/sauce-rub-marinade/barbecuesauce/easternn.txt

1 cup White vinegar
1 cup Cider vinegar
1 tablespoon Sugar
1 tablespoon Crushed red pepper flakes
1 tablespoon Tabasco sauce
Salt to taste
Freshly cracked black pepper to taste

Take pictures of the book during group reading (teacher is displaying it to the rest of the class using a projector say). Make it available for self selected reading later. Perhaps create PowerPoint presentation with the pictures and easily recorded audio of someone reading the text for each page. Enable typing in the text so it can be read using TTS either continuously or one word at a time. Make it easy to share these on some closed site. What about the copyright provisions related to people with disabilities? Public Law 104-197 would allow us to do this in a “specialized format”. That says to me it couldn’t be PowerPoint but that is not problem, we’d just have a specialized player. Very simple to show pictures and play speech. Might even be browser based. Could the whole thing be easily made browser based? Should it be?

Thanks to Martha for pointing out this video: TED | Talks | Tod Machover, Dan Ellsey: Releasing the music in your head (video). Very interesting. I’d love to do something like this for kids. Machover talks about Hyperscore.

Links I found related to classification.

• SHOGUN: SHOGUN Project Documentation
• pychem
• Resources for Discriminant Analysis
• Linear discriminant analysis
• Principal components analysis

I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 and switched to a new theme based on the copyblogger theme. Please point out any bugs you see.

24 ways: Marking Up a Tag Cloud is an excellent discussion of how to implement a cloud using CSS. I hadn’t realized that most ways of doing it are inaccessible. I used his approach to construct my query cloud page.

Ian Bicking’s interesting and provocative blog post on HTML Accessibility is a good read. Empirical accessibility is a good idea. I think by this he means making it work for real users. Fred Brooks’ ideas about the computer scientist as toolsmith seem very relevant.

I’ve been thinking about grass-roots accessibility for a while, though I can’t say I’ve made much progress. It seems to me we have to somehow empower people to enhance accessibility in a bottom up way without much help from developers.

For some if my Windows testing VMware, sadly, won’t do the job. For example, I can’t get my USB webcam’s to work on an XP guest running on VMware on my Ubuntu machine. For testing these things I have to use my laptop. Unfortunately that requires copying files over. So I wanted to share my Ubuntu files with my laptop.

It took a while and I tried many things but I think this is the combination that did the trick.

In Synaptic, install samba.

At the command prompt, run

 sudo smbpasswd -a yourid

give it your password and the password you want to use from the windows machine.

Now on the windows machine you should be able to connect. You may need to use the numeric IP address of the host.

Emacs python mode supports running scripts in an inferior python process that is running in an emacs buffer. I really like this idea but have never been able to reliably use it because so much of my work depends on external libraries that may not do a complete job of cleaning up their state. Attempting to reuse them in the same process is, in my experience, a recipe for confusion. Also, emacs seems to be hung waiting on the python subprocess while my GUI app is running. As a result, I always edit in emacs and then switch to a command prompt to run.

It occurred to me that if I my program doesn’t need input (almost all mine have a GUI) I can run them using the emacs compile command. The compile command in emacs is intended for running make and other command-line build tools. The command runs in a separate process and its output is directed to an emacs buffer. I tried it out and it works great!

In my .emacs file I defined this function

(defun my-compile ()
  "Use compile to run python programs"
  (interactive)
  (compile (concat "python " (buffer-name))))
(setq compilation-scroll-output t)

This function invokes compile with python foo.py when I’m editing a buffer named foo.py. The setq makes the compilation buffer scroll to follow the output.

And then in my python-mode hook function I added:

  (local-set-key "\C-c\C-c" 'my-compile)

This binds Ctrl-C Ctrl-C to compile instead of the usual eval-buffer which I never use anyway.

Now I can edit and type Ctrl-C Ctrl-C to run. If my program raises an exception, I get a traceback in the emacs buffer. emacs parses the buffer looking for error messages. It notices the File lines in the trace back and sets them up so I can click on a filename to visit the file and line associated with the traceback.

I’m loving this! No more directing my program output into a file when I’m printing tons of debug messages. No more constant Alt-Tab to switch between emacs and the command prompt.

I’m using it on Ubuntu, but a quick test indicates this works on Windows also.