Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with processing

Egocentricity/Self-absorbtion

Garden — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 10:01:28 -0800

Does anyone have any experience with self-absorption/egocentricity? I've been noticing the fact that whenever I'm talking with others, I tend to bring the conversation around to myself. I keep telling myself not to talk about myself, but people ask questions and when they do I tend to fall for it every time. How do you make conversations with others and build friendships without talking about yourself? I usually start with open-ended questions and try and find out as much as I can about the other person, but the conversation inevitably turns toward myself as you can't just interrogate someone or else they'll think you're really strange. This is probably a silly question. From a psychological perspective they say that egocentricity is a stage that we all go through while growing up. For whatever reason it seems that I haven't made it through this stage quite yet. The other part of conversation that I struggle with is that when I'm speaking with someone, I tend to listen so intently to what the person is saying that I have a hard time processing what they're actually getting at. Does anyone else experience this? I'm not sure whether I'm trying to think of the next thing that I want to ask the person or whether I'm just trying too hard and unable to relax. Any suggestions from people who have struggled with these issues would be greatly appreciated.

help me play well with others

crazylegs — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 14:49:26 -0800

Looking for a universally compatible word processing program that can I download for free off the internet. I'm using Open Office on my computer, which I got for free. It works fine for me but sometimes when I send files to other people they're unable to open them. As I'm applying for academic jobs, this doesn't make me look very good, to say the least. What word processing program, can I get off the internet, for free, that will be universally compatible with any other computers to which I might send files? Thanks!

Strange Voices

phrontist — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 23:02:16 -0800

Recommend some music like Bon Iver's Woods, Imogen Heap's Hide and Seek, Beardyman, and some of Jamie Lidell - which feature nothing (or very little) but the human voice modified by electronics. Augmented acapellas, if you will.

Canning season is here - we need advice on how to keep our pickled veggies crunchy!

pghjezebel — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:31:19 -0800

Canning season is here - we need advice on how to keep our pickled veggies crunchy! Mom and I are gearing up for our yearly canning weekend. Last years batch was a huge success (taste-wise) but our veggies weren't as crunchy as we would have liked them to be.

What tips can you give us on making our veggies as crunchy as possible? (And any tried and true recipes that you love are welcome as well - the stronger the kick the better!)

We're going to be doing:
Cauliflower, celery and carrots
Garlicky dilly beans
Pickles (if we have the time)

Learning to analyze text

signal — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 20:46:35 -0800

Please help me crash-course language and text analysis. I'm working with a group of researchers who've won a grant to analyze over 2000 magazine articles that cover a time span of 30 years. The idea is to process the articles' texts to find how certain themes show up and mutate over the years, the first appearance of certain ideas, etc.
I'm the default computer guy, and need to figure out precisely what we're going to be studying and program or download the tools we will use to do so.
I don't have CS degree (I have an Architecture degree & masters and make a living doing web dev). I use Python for my everyday work, and didn't have much trouble following Segaran's "Programming Collective Intelligence".
Please advise me on the books or websites I need to read, or the keywords I should be searching for.

My skills with Word are not as advanced as I thought they were..

royalsong — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 07:07:51 -0800

[WordProcessingFilter] I need this document formatted a specific way. Bare with me as I try to explain. I don't want the the text beside the date to wrap under the numbers. If it must wrap, I want it to wrap under the first word of the line before it. I know I can do this with tables, but I kind of need to do this asap (I stupidly told the client that it would take me less than an hour). If I must do it with tables, is there a way to limit Microsoft Word's Find/Replace tool to say: replace ONLY first space in a paragraph with a tab character?

Is there another way to do it?

Help me hive mind!

Natural Language Processing, relative basis for search.

kuatto — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 16:05:43 -0800

Natural Language Processing (NLP) Filter. I'm looking for a method (or category of methods) to judge the relevancy of a small unit of text, 100-200 chars, against similar units of text. I have a large set of these textual units, I'm trying to discover the "relatedness" of my query unit (an item drawn from that set) to any other unit in the set, but judged relatively to the set as a whole.

In other words, I'm not looking for just an ordered list of rankings of my query applied to every document in the set. Rather an ordered list of rankings of my query applied to every document in the set then normalized by the magnitude of my query applied to the set as a whole (perhaps via some averaging function.)

Do traditional search engines (open source, like lucene or xapian) do this already?

What I mean by relatedness is that we are talking about the same things by some, arbitrary, empirical measure. In other words, there is no supervised or unsupervised learning, just some off-the-shelf measure of 'relatedness'.

Dissecting the Photoshop "stamp" filter

BugsPotter — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 09:34:30 -0800

I'd like to programmatically recreate the Photoshop stamp filter - does anyone know how to dissect what the stamp filter is doing? The Photoshop settings I'm using with the Stamp filter are: Light/Dark Balance set to 25 and Smoothness set to 5. I'd like to be able to recreate this effect without using Photoshop, but I'm not really sure what's going on under the hood. Any thoughts or pointers would be much appreciated. Thanks!!

A Graphic Equalizer for Images?

jfrancis — Sun, 10 May 2009 17:12:16 -0800

Is there such a thing as a graphic equalizer for images? Can I obtain it? In Photoshop you can high pass filter an image (edges and details) or low pass filter it (blur it). But there isn't continuous control over a range of frequencies.

Does some software exist that I as an average user can get a hold of that does the necessary Fourier analysis (or whatever is necessary) to give me fine control over any frequencies in an image I wish to address?

Sort of a graphic equalizer for photos?

How to get wordperfect registration pop up to stop on Vista

Twinedog — Fri, 08 May 2009 16:18:39 -0800

Is there anyway to get Wordperfect 12 registration alert box to stop popping up everytime I login to my Windows vista accounts? Okay so wordperfect 12 ( agreeably an outdated version which surely predates vista) runs fine in Vista in terms of word processing, except that even though I registered the product through the web I still get the registration pop-up thingie each time I login to any of my windows vista accounts on my cpu.

Is there a way to change the registry settings manually to stop this annoying pop-up from popping up with each login?

I know one has to be very careful when making changes to the registry. Any advice is appreciated.

Photo Workflow Tips?

Admiral Haddock — Mon, 04 May 2009 10:21:01 -0800

Any good tips on digital workflows in Lightroom for large groups of images? Really, any input on the photo editorial process (whether it be film or other software) would be much appreciated. I take a lot of pictures when I go out shooting, and even more so when I go on vacation. (I realize my "a lot" is nowhere near what a pro might shoot.) I really like processing and cataloging my images in Lightroom, but I find the process entirely overwhelming when faced with 3000 new photos.

Does anyone have any tips on making that process manageable? For instance, the other day I shot a concert and took, say 150 images in a fifteen-minute set. I wanted only a few selects of different setups, but I might have 20 images of the guitarist and bass player scattered throughout the set, and I found it maddening to search around for comparisons of image 12 vs 34 vs 45 vs 54 etc. And, of course, it is easy to crop down to just the guitarist or the bass player, so you may end up comparing with those sets, too.

My current workflow is to import and tag with the highest-level common keywords. I then advance image by image flagging picks. I then go through the picks several times while refining the images. Along the way, bad shots get unflagged, and shots that I like but that don't quite make the cut are labeled with a color (usually yellow, as the shortcut for yellow is right above unflag shortcut) and then unflagged--just in case I want to revisit images that were good, but not great. The end result is a pile of flagged (but without a color label) images that I export for the web or printing.

What do you do?

Armchair analysts, take a shot in the dark!

Anonymous — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:54:29 -0800

My boss is a very nice man with some very strange shortcomings that I cannot explain. Help me out with some wild conjecture. I work in the media industry as a designer. My boss is a very sweet, emotional, sensitive and kind man. He is very positive and upbeat, and easily gives praise. There is not a malicious bone in his body and I like him very much as a friend.

But as a boss, working with him can be very difficult. I've been puzzling over the reasons for his sometimes odd behavior for months. The biggest problem I have with him is his seeming inability to relay a message correctly. Clients will tell him why they don't like a layout, for example. "We don't like the guy with the hat in the corner. He looks too formal." He will come back to our design team and say, "No guys with hats, get rid of that guy, he has a hat", when in fact, the guy in question is perfectly acceptable. So we'll get rid of a guy from a photo who we could have used because he did not relay the gist of what the client said, just the most superficial level of it. It's gotten to the point where I never trust anything he says when it comes to relaying information, because it's almost always either fractured or outright wrong. You have to be able to grasp nuance to communicate to your designers, and since most of us never get to meet with our client, this makes our job very difficult.

He often misunderstands instructions and has on several occasions told me the incorrect deadline, or misquoted someone. When I double check this information, the person who was misquoted or who gave the deadline professes confusion, and we discover that it was my boss who gave the incorrect information. As far as I can tell, he is not hard of hearing.

Or someone who barely even knows us or our company will mention, "I hear your company is going to lose XX% of its workforce". And instead of thinking back to last month when we lost XX% of our workforce and realizing that the stranger is clearly referring to what has already happened, he immediately assumes that something is being hidden from him, and panics that we're all going to lose our jobs.

He has very low standards for work, and usually approves the first thing that lands on his desk instead of pushing anyone to do better. He will bring up what he perceives to be a problem, "This layout has the blonde in front, don't you think she should be in back?" and when you try to explain your point for putting the blonde in front, instead of listening to your reasons or pushing his own point, he says, "Ok! Got it, just thought I'd ask" and walks away.

All of this I could understand better if he were unintelligent, but he's not. He is very earnest and sincere, but he also has a dry wit and it's always a delight to be at the butt of his affectionate jokes. To try and fill in the picture more, he is very nervous and takes some kind of medication for his nerves. If not Xanax, then something like it.

So why does this charming, lovable man have such a problem with communication and translating the thoughts of others?

Help me Optimod-ize my audio!

CommonSense — Tue, 21 Apr 2009 15:35:46 -0800

Is there a good real-time compressor/limiter for FM broadcast that I can use on a Mac? Preferably one that works as an AudioUnit (AU) plug-in? I'm feeding audio for an LPFM station from iTunes over to AU Lab (which comes free with OS X's Xcode Tools), which allows you to run the audio through AU plug-ins, a variety of which come bundled with the Xcode Tools. They're pretty good, but I'd like to find something that really "punches up" the audio for FM broadcast.

Ideally, I'd like something that's an "Orban Optimod clone," the way SoundSolution does on Windows. It apparently has a reputation for being THE compressor/limiter plug-in, but it's only for WinAmp on Windows, which kinda sucks for me.

My Google-fu is failing me, and I keep coming across consumer-oriented software, which strikes me as glorified volume boosters. I can't seem to even find commercial software that accomplishes what I need. Hardware seems to be the only option, but that's not really realistic for me right now.

Is there any hope?

Does anyone still process 110 format film?

tealsocks — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:22:29 -0800

Does anyone still process 110 format film? I live in a smallish town in eastern Canada with no mom-n-pop photo shops, so I doubt I'll be able to get this done locally. Can anyone recommend any mail-in services that will process (and maybe even print) this format? How much can I expect to pay for a service like that? Or can I have the local Kodak shop send it off somewhere for me?

Credit Card Processing for Freelancer

ottereroticist — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:04:39 -0800

Freelancer needs to process large credit card transactions. One of my freelance clients (U.S. Fortune 50 company) wants to pay me via credit card for invoices under 10K.

I have a PayPal business account and a ProPay Premium account, but neither one is working for me. (PayPal throws an error when I try to enter a transaction on the corporate AmEx card, and ProPay wants me to leave $2000 in a reserve account for six months in order to increase my transaction limits.)

How can I get set up to accept transactions of this size as easily and cheaply as possible?

Help me fix my text!

Infernarl — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 02:24:28 -0800

Is there a free program like Textsoap for Windows Vista? From their website:

"TextSoap is a text cleaning utility that maintains formatting while it cleans up text." For example, it can remove extraneous carriage returns or spaces in text copied from a website and turn it into normal document style text.

I am often trying to print things out, such as game FAQS from gamefaqs.com and they are formatted in such a way as to make them fit on hundreds more pages than necessary. Such a program woud allow me to automatically reformat such a document into normal text.

Film to 01010011?

Solomon — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:09:13 -0800

Where in the UK can I send my 24 + 36 exposure camera films to have them transferred to CD/otherwise digitalised? I've looked into this online, but all of the 2-3 companies I've found require that I buy prints at the same time as getting the film developed. I'd much rather be able to see what the pictures are going to look like, before I splash out on prints.

The other avenue I've seen is getting a film scanner, but I don't want to do this. I can't afford it, it's not going to be worth buying the hardware for the half dozen films I have and I don't have the experience.

What I want is somewhere like Truprint, that I can send the films to, get them transferred to digital, and then order them (either from that company or elsewhere) once I can see how they're going to turn out. Preferably via post.

Where might I find such a place?

Help me learn everything I need to know about visual processing (and improving it).

mintchip — Sat, 06 Sep 2008 19:12:03 -0800

Help me learn everything I need to know about visual processing (and improving it). I would like to learn more about visual processing and how one can improve it. For example:

1. What region of the brain controls visual processing, and what activities/exercises have been shown to stimulate this region?
2. What activities have been found (or would be likely) to be helpful in improving visual procesing?
3. What if someone has deficits in this from birth as opposed to someone who has acquired visual processing deficits (for example, from a car accident). Would they present differently?
4. Are there any supplements that may be useful, either in improving visual processing or protecting this from further impairment?
5. What are some resources or links that would help me learn more about visual processing problems?
6. Is there anything in addition to simple practice that athletes do to improve their visual processing speed and accuracy (for example, a baseball player who needs to improve his reaction time and accuracy) when up at bat.
7. Anything else I need to know.

Thanks!

Shell scripting or something better?

Blazecock Pileon — Fri, 09 May 2008 14:19:40 -0800

Faster techniques for grabbing lines of a file and doing text manipulation and arithmetic via shell (or other) scripting? 1. Are there faster ways to grab lines of a text file?

Currently I use while read line and sed -n #p filename in bash and csh scripts to grab lines of a file I'm interested in. This seems slow. Are there better (faster) ways to get the line of a file, or to iterate through specified ranges of lines in a file?

2. Are there faster ways than awk to grab values in a line?

Let's say I have the tab-delimited line:

abc 123 345 0.52

What I'd like to do is get the second and third values, or the fourth value, as quickly as possible. Is there a better way than awk? Will a perl or other interpreted language script run faster than a shell script for scraping values from a text file?

3. Arithmetic with bash?

I've been doing $((${value1}+${value2})) for integer arithmetic and calc ${value1} / ${value2} for floating point arithmetic within bash. Will I gain a performance benefit from switching over my code from bash to another shell script language, or to another interpreted language entirely?

Thanks for any and all tips and tricks.

270 .Vobs a Week, Help Convert!

bleucube — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 13:12:25 -0800

Need help on a huge .Vob conversion to the best bandwidth saving format project. I've stumbled in an on going project that I need to take charge otherwise my life will become hell.

Background:
Every week we will have 270 1 hour videos on DVD. The project trial will last 16-18 weeks but may become mandatory after that. The cameras in use record straight to DVD and are approximately 1.4 gigs. The person in charge proposes a horrible two-stage conversion process. 1) A shareware program to convert VOB to WMV which brings it down to "150 megs". 2) Windows Movie Maker to bring it down to "80 megs". This process takes 1.5 hours for each video. The person than will upload the video to a private youtube. The video will be embedded using Microsoft share point services. Bandwidth is very tight.

Questions:
1. What's the best video format that’s watchable but requires the less amount of bandwidth?

2. Any cameras that record straight to FLV with running time of 2+ hours, or to the answer #1?

3. Embedding vs. streaming. Is it true that embedding only saves on bandwidth if the viewer doesn't watch the whole thing or fast forwards to certain points in the video?

Instead of the propose method I thought of the following alternatives:
1. Send all videos on DVD to a third party company that will process VOB files and convert them to lowest bandwidth usage format (flv?). They will host the files for us (eliminating the need for extra in house bandwidth). This saves staff time and would probably pay for itself over time. Do you know of a company that does this local to the US?

2. Create a server that performs batching processing of VOB files to FLV. The server will watch an incoming folder, any time a VOB files is present it will convert it to FLV and upload it via FTP to a third party host. Do you know of an application that does this? Winff is great for individual use, but I don't think it has the features I would need.

3. Hire students and interns to do all the converting.

4. Other suggestions?

Server-side image merge?

mwhybark — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:26:43 -0800

What are my options for including an auto-merged image file in the context of a website? Here's a quick description of the functionality I'm after:

A generic page layout which incorporates some corporate branding is assembled. The layout is then deployed over several domains and subdomains.

The key branding element is a corporate logo in the upper right and is used as a 'home' navigation element, just as Matt uses the Metafilter logos on these sites.

The logo, however, should render on demand and then remain as a server-side cached element, and the rendering should add either the fully-qualified domain for the specific site - or - a titling element which can be defined by an administrator.

In summary, the textual elements should be 'stamped' onto the logo image. Ideally the textual elements would appear to be a part of the design of the logo and adhere to professional type-design-and-display standards with arbitrary font definition, reasonable kerning, antialiasing, consistent baseline control, and so forth.

Flash-based solutions are acceptable, probably. Server-side solutions that rely on roll-your-own code to call ImageMagick are probably out; an off-the-shelf script that uses ImageMagick might be acceptable (I will need to verify that ImageMagick is available within the hosted environment). Java-based and Quicktime solutions are not acceptable.

Help me find the best real-time video generative software for someone with little programming experience.

itchi23 — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:48:59 -0800

Help me find the best real-time video generative software for someone with little programming experience (PC, no Mac.) I've been using Resolume for a few weeks for just triggering clips and manipulating effects, and I think it might be really great for VJ'ing, but I'm also looking for a generative video app to use for my video art. I've looked into vvvv, Pure Data, Processing, Jitter, etc., and can't seem to tell the differences between them, and more importantly, how easy each one is to learn. I have little-to-no programming experience, but I'm willing to learn some coding if it'll help.

I'd like to manipulate objects in real-time (ex. importing a path from Illustrator, or a flash object, or maybe even a 3D model), as well as visualize incoming data streams and be able to manipulate the video output. Obviously, I'd also want to use video clips, fframe plugs, etc. Is this something I'd be able to do in a single app, or in real-time - and if so, how easy would it be to learn for someone with little programming experience, but a lot of media production experience?

Alternately, is this something that Flash could do? A lot of VJ apps can use swfs, and if I could program a swf to take incoming data and/or react to outside input streams, that's an additional thing to consider. I'd much more inclined to go with Flash if it's a viable option. Thanks!

How to get submission form fields from email to database and more!

prophetsearcher — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 14:20:48 -0800

How can a new company track leads submitted via its website through the sales and post-sales process, simply, automatically, and online? (Caution- IDon'tReallyKnowWhatIWantFilter:)

I'm helping to start a small company (well, it's really a division of a larger consulting firm) that is selling a one-off product/service to non-profits.

Through AdWords, I have managed to attract nearly 30 leads a day (which I'm quite pleased with, considering the cost of our product). Problem is, each lead comes into my inbox - as well as my partners' - as emails. (I believe the site is an ASP.net site, with form submissions. I'm pretty clueless, though).

Is there a way that each of these emails, which is a filled out form, could automagically be imported, fields intact, into some sort of database (ideally, online, but not necessarily).

Even better, would be if we could add notes to each lead ("Joe called Org on 30/1/08 and was asked to call back in a week") and automated reminders ("2/7/08: Joe- Call Org back"), and results ("2/12/08: Product Sold for $999,999.95") and more followups (8/12/08: "Call Org to find out how product was used; interested in more?")

This all would have to be (1) not crazy-expensive (2) easy to use (3) ideally, usable by people in different continents (ie, online?).

I suppose, all else fails, a Google Spreadsheet could take care of some of this, but I'm looking for a frictionless solution that would import our leads, fire off reminders, integrate with our address books and calendars, etc.

I've seen this question, but it didn't seem exactly right and didn't get the types of responses I'm hoping for. Honestly, I'm not quite sure even what I'm looking for or if it exists in our price range...

I'm not scared of a little bit of mucking around, as long as that's only for the setup. It would have to be foolproof for the other end users.

Break an image into tiles

RobotHero — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 09:01:54 -0800

Help me automate the splitting of an image into tiles. I'm making a tile-based map-like program, and I want to be able to split a very large image into tiles for use in this. It might result in hundreds or thousands of tiles so I clearly won't do it all manually.

My initial image will probably be an .ai file, and I want to be able to output it as .png files for transparency. (So one cheap program I found online won't work, since it outputs to .jpeg.)

I have Photoshop CS3, and I think it's possible that I could make a batch processing macro of some sort, though I will need to learn more about it to figure out how.

So, any good tutorials on how to code more complex batch processing in Photoshop, or recommendations for other software I should use?

How can I get an "average" of several images?

k7lim — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 10:57:24 -0800

How can I generate a "visual average" from a group of digital images?

A few years ago, I saw a BoingBoing post in which a guy had taken the pixel means of Playboy centerfolds for several decades. I'd like to use the same technique and am wondering if there's any off-the-shelf (preferably free) stuff that can do that.