In case anyone is interested in how to prove "(N + M) Choose (M) paths":
Any such path ends at (N,M). Such a path can be represented as a sequence of N+M bits, 0=right, 1=up, where there are exactly M ups. So choosing a path is identical to choosing the positions of the M ups, thus there are (N+M) choose (M) such paths.
EDIT: My first proof was needlessly complicated because it dealt with paths that ended at arbitrary (N,m) but really you can just let the paths go all the way up to (N,M)-- even if the max value in the list is m < M-- and just ignore the last part of the path. It's still a bijection.
It comes with a Musicbrainz plugin which allows you to select an album in your library and search for it on musicbrainz (e.g. by artist name and year or number of tracks-- so you really dont need to have much info) and then you can select a match (there are usually many releases of a given album and it will actually differentiate between them) and then tag your album with the musicbrainz tags.
In fact you don't even need to use quodlibet to get this feature. It has a separate tagging component called "ex falso" which you can run standalone and then use the player of your choice.
But I would strongly recommend Quodlibet for its organizational capabilities as well. For example it uses special internal tags (not id3 but stored in a separate db) that allow you to associate "people" and "performers" to a track so that the track will appear when you search for any of those people.
Also there are sort tags that allow you to customize where stuff shows up, e.g. I can have a track with Artist tag "London Symphony Orchestra", composer tag "Ludwig von Beethoven" (the proper ID3 tags) BUT I give it the artistsort tag "Beethoven" so it shows up under B. Perfect!
Lastly it has regex search! And you can make "saved searhes" e.g. playlists. And it's lightweight and has an uncluttered (but highly customizable) interface. And it's very easy to write plugins for it.
Nice, I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in trying this.
But talking to myself, I'm disgusted with all of this, so I'm just maintaining my mess in its current state for now.
Still, I like to see such solution, and I'd be really interested in a counter article to what I wrote dealing with each issue. Even if at the end, I will likely not use the given solution.
About the regex search, I'm not sure that's really the solution to the "textual problem". As mentioned in the article, the music content retrieval system is in my opinion the future. Echonest and similar services are trying to achieve something like this. Looking for one artist isn't really what you actually want most of the time. It's likely you are looking for good music, and just want to listen to things who sound "like this".
Sorry-- I was unclear. The regex is not for organization. It's just an easy and flexible way to browse subsets of your library, like smart playlists in iTunes, but more powerful.
Surprised to see no mention of the website Criticker. Been using it for a few years now (ever since I cancelled Netflix and missed the recommendation engine).
Criticker's rating system is out of 100 points but for each user it scales ratings into tiers (deciles) 1-10. So for someone like me who watches lots of movies that I sort of know I'm gonna like (thanks to Criticker!), most of my ratings end up in the 70 to 100 range, but I still have 5 tiers in that range. The wide range allows the system to adapt to a user's biased view of the scale. Also plenty of users simply keep their rankings from 0-10.
Criticker gives recommendations in two ways. First it predicts my ranking for a movie. So I can just browse unwatched movies and filter them however I like and then sort by how Criticker expects I will rate them. It is actually scary how predictable I am.
The other method of recommendations is to browse users who have very high correlation to my rankings and see what movies they've ranked highly which I have not seen. This might be the best way to find movies. It also seems to be the key to how the expected ratings I mentioned above are computed.
No doubt one of the things that keeps Criticker running so well is a community of serious film buffs. It makes it easy to find movies I would have never heard of otherwise (foreign, limited release, shorts).
A butterfly flaps its wings, xkcd puts up a comic on ratings, someone piggybacks on the comic, it makes the front page of HN, you wander by and mention criticker, a bunch of geeks pile onto the site to check it out... and it ends up crashy for a while.
Cool site, thanks for mentioning it. From what I saw before it went down (too many mysql connections?), it even looks like I can export my ratings.
Duplicity is a simple tool for signed/encrypted (PGP) differential backups using a variety of protocols including: ssh/scp, local file access, rsync, ftp, HSI, WebDAV, Tahoe-LAFS, and Amazon S3. I'm assuming that rackspace storage supports at least one of these?
There is a very easy to use command line interace, and also a GUI (which I have not tried).
Thanks, I love duplicity from a technical standpoint, but for some reason, I'd like to have a native OSX UI and the ability to access my data from my iOS device while on the go.
Everyone here seems so satisfied, but to be honest I am still skeptical. It would be nice in the "browse flights wanted" screen you showed some baseline price for the requested flight (e.g. automated kayak search, though i'm guessing that is in violation of their TOS. perhaps you can just have a link to the query) so that potential customers could see some samples of the kind of savings to expect.
We used to do this, but there was too much contention around the base price. Imagine if we showed a base price of $1000 and on your favourite search engine you saw $950. This created an adversarial situation with our flyers.
Then we had the issue of a specific requirement in the comments (e.g. I'm relocating to another country with my two pets). The experts would put up the full cost of flying with the pets, but then our base price would undercut them because no flight API handles pets.
Then we used virtual assistants to find the base prices considering the comments, but of course they couldn't interpret the comments properly. E.g. someone said they didn't want red-eye flights, but the VA didn't understand what that meant and gave a red-eye price that was hundreds below the expert prices.
Sorry for the long reply, but would love to hear any suggestions around this. At the moment we're trying to create a better flyer-expert relationship.
Agreed. You really don't have to be a savant to memorize these. Only about half of them are non-obvious. Another quarter are just spellings of letters. And the last quarter might be obscure, but just playing a few games using the list and gaining all those points and I guarantee you'll have them down.
