Month: January 2014

Code

SoundSoftware tutorial at AES 53

Chris Cannam

I’ll be co-presenting the first tutorial session at the Audio Engineering Society 53rd Conference on Semantic Audio, this weekend.

(It’s the society’s 53rd Conference, and it happens to be about semantic audio. It’s not their 53rd conference about semantic audio. In fact it’s their second: that was also the theme of the AES 42nd Conference in 2011.

What is semantic audio? Good question, glad you asked. I believe it refers to extraction or estimation of any semantic material from audio, including speech recognition and music information retrieval.)

My tutorial, for the SoundSoftware project, is about developing better and more reliable software during research work. That’s a very deep subject, so at best we’ll barely hint at a few techniques during one programming exercise:

  • making readable experimental code using the IPython Notebook, and sharing code for review with colleagues and supervisors;
  • using version control software to manage revisions and escape disaster;
  • modularising and testing any code that can be used in more than one experiment;
  • packaging, publishing, and licensing code;
  • and the motivations for doing the above.

We presented a session at the Digital Audio Effects (DAFx) conference in 2012 which covered much of this material in presentation style, and a tutorial at the International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) in 2012 which featured a “live” example of test-driven development in research software. You can find videos and slides from those tutorials here. The theme of this one is similar, and I’ll be reusing some code from the ISMIR tutorial, but I hope we can make this one a bit more hands-on.

 

Crap Things from Big Companies

On Vodafone

Chris Cannam

Vodafone UK still haven’t fixed the problem I grumbled about in my previous post. They’ve left me unable to use my primary mobile number for 7 weeks now.

The phone works and has the right number, but it has become detached from the billing account somehow and can’t be topped up, making it effectively useless.

After talking to the friendly folk on Vodafone’s support lines got me nowhere, I switched to dealing with the people in my local Vodafone store. They’ve also been as helpful as they can possibly be. Unfortunately, all that means is that they, rather than I, have been getting nowhere by trying to talk to the technical team.

I did get to see what my account looks like on Vodafone’s systems though. It’s blank. They can search for my mobile number, and the search succeeds, but the record that comes back has nothing in it—even the phone number field is empty.

I also finally managed to get a ticketing number for the problem with their technical team. The ticket has a “72-hour SLA”, but they haven’t managed to update it in over a fortnight despite several reminders from the store staff.

Vodafone’s customer accounts website has been down for most of this week. They had network outages in several areas, last week and this.

Their systems are looking pretty fragile.

(Other networks have their problems too: EE screwed up billing for many, many pay-as-you-go customers last week. But at least they fixed that one fairly quickly.)

Edit: Vodafone fixed this on the 27th January, just after I posted this and tweeted about it. The combination of social media pressure with an actual ticket number for an open technical ticket seems to have done the trick.