Thursday, June 24, 2010

Akademy is approaching


Akademy is approaching faster than it is good for me. Just too many things to do until then. One of those things is to prepare my talk. As long as I haven't found a template yet, I modified an existing one. You can grab the first draft here (OpenOffice ODF). Please improve it and share it again.

I'm looking forward to see you all there!

TO DOs:
Flight: Booked.
Hotel: Booked.
Paper: Sent.
Talk: Concept and template done.
Planned the first two days in Helsinki: Failed.
Organized travel from Helsinki to Tampere: Not started yet.
....

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Calling for help

In the last years I was hunting the secrets of successful open source communities (for my PhD thesis). The analysis of the principles of those fantastic communities is done. The next (and last step) is:

How could the positive effects of open source communities be transfered to classical organizations. Of cause I have some ideas but I think it would enrich my work if I could discuss those ideas with people from "real life".

Most people are happy to live in an self-determined, passion encouraging, fearless "open source community environment" but are not convinced to privde such an environment to their subordinates, because they fear to loose control etc.

It wouldn't be so difficult to get interviews with empleyees or lower management. The problem is, that these groups generaly like the idea to have such a workenvironment, too, but have very limited possibilities to let their dreams come true. (And it is easier to impress the professors with the opinion of somebody from top management.)

This would be the perfect interview / discussion partner for me:
  • A member of top management of
  • a medium-sized or major enterprises
  • who is interested in new ideas to shape the company way beyond cost reduction (e.g. the increase the use of collective intelligence in the enterprise, the creation of a passionate environment or the introduction of the "sharing spirit" etc.).
  • It would help if the company / manager has heard from the open source movement and the power of communities before.
  • (Non software related branches would be more intersting, because the differences between them and open software communities are bigger.)
I tried the last weeks to get to those peolpe but without success.

So if you have some connections to top management (e.g. NOKIA!) please let me know.
( thomas dot thym at gmail dot com)

And by the way:

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Cut mp3 and ogg files without decoding

Audio editing software (in many cases at least) is decoding the audio files before edit. At the end they are encoded again. If you only want to split the file with the mentioned method the quality of the file decreases.
The command line tool mp3splt [1] does that job (without de-/encoding) for mp3 and ogg files. (And there is even a gtk-gui.)

The basic command is just:

mp3splt [options] filename starttime endtime

e.g. mp3splt -f filename.mp3 02.55 06.22
Option -f for variable bitrates
The output will be in filename_02m_55s__06m_22s.mp3

There are several options. Take a look at the manual [2].

[1] http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net
[2] http://mp3splt.sourceforge.net/mp3splt_page/documentation/man.html