Prodigy - Experience (right now) I find electronic music to be the best to listen to while coding. No real lyrics to pay attention to.

Hello, I'm not sure if this is the best place for this, but it's the first and only place I could think of. I have had an idea for a while and have done some quick research and was wondering what people thought about it and if anybody is interested in perhaps helping me do something with it. My idea has to do with identifying songs or audio files with some sort of waveform "thumbprint". An application that I thought of that could use this is an mp3 tagger for example. Text is a very unreliable method of matching for applications like this. Audio matching is the best option that I can think of. The thing is, is that waveform matching is not a new idea as it turns out. Here's a site I found that deals with this problem... http://www.cs.hmc.edu/clinic/projects/2001/auditude/description.html[^] The company auditude (www.auditude.com[^]) has some technology that creates audio "thumbprints" and they also have a product called ID3man (www.ID3man.com[^]) that does ID3 tag matching. I downloaded this product and it asks you a whole bunch of personal questions in order to use it which I find to be completely unnecessary and it also costs money to use it (which is not really all that bad, people need to make money some how). So the technology exists and auditude says that have 3 million+ audio signatures in their database to match against. But I'd like to create something similar that is a little more open and not so intrusive (no personal questions required for something so trivial). The CDDB vs. FreeDB thing is sort of what I'd like to do. I think auditude needs a little competition (if that's possible :)) So what do you people think? Don't bother? Great idea? I'm pretty clueless with audio, so that's where I'm pretty stuck. If anybody thinks they can help or just if you have comments then please let me know. I've been unemployed for 10 months now, so I've got lots of time on my hands. ;) Thanks, Andrew (noname123@shaw.ca)

First time I saw it I thought it wasn't too bad, but that was about it. I've seen in too many times now and am quite sick of it already. Just my 2 cents.

Yes, I agree. This is not a good idea. Better alternatives are providing a foster home for a pet from a humane society or some other similar organiztion. Think about the animals and not the cash.

Exactly. I find it funny how americans call themselves americans even though there is a North and South America. Techinically we're all pretty much american in the Western Hemisphere, but don't call anybody american outside the states (at least in Canada), we don't like it (at least I don't). :)

I've also been interested in working/living in Australia or New Zealand for quite a while now. I'm currently in Canada. It seems to me that if I really want a job there, that I should pack up and go and look for work there instead of trying to get a job while I'm still in Canada. Is this a safe assumption or not? Which citie(s) in Australia or New Zealand are considered the high tech centres? What resources or news papers are a good place to look? Thanks in advance.

Maybe you'd be interested in this then (or have already tried it)... http://www.redhat.com/download/cygwin.html It's a unix environment for windows including a bash shell.

Search for CompletionChar in the registry. Set the value to 9 and you can get tab completion in dos windows. This is default in XP apparently but and has been in windows since NT4.0 supposedly. Tab cycles to the next selection and Shift+Tab the previous. I wish I knew of this way back when. Anybody else know of this or was I just out of the loop? :)

If you have linux installed you can use the free ps2pdf command line tool. Just print the word doc to file using a postscript printer and then convert it to pdf using ps2pdf. Maybe try this website as well... (i've never used it myself) http://www.ps2pdf.com/convert/index.htm

Cricket is about the only dart game I play here in Canada. There are variations of the game at http://www.crowsdarts.com/games/cricket.html. I started and have always played the 2nd variation from that page called Wild Mouse... it's also called Minnesota or Moose (Minnesota is just South of me (I'm in Manitoba)), so I guess that sort of explains why this is the variation that I have been exposed to. Give it a try, it's more challenging and a lot more fun I find. :)