The title says it all: I am looking for a generic implementation that tells me the edit distance of two lists. The implementations on CPAN all seem to work on string-data. Which is OK for finding typos but makes WER calculation tedious.

So, I want a generic implementation that takes a comparator-function (as in sort {$a <=> $b} @list) and two lists and outputs the edit distance. Nice to have would be distance-weights and really nifty if the value of the comparator function (not only !=0 but how much lower or higher) was taken into account.

Luckily I don't need it now, so I don't have to write it. But it would be a great finger exercise for a Perl-in-NLP class.

EDIT: The obvious module Text::Levenshtein on CPAN actually *miscalculates* Levenshtein-distance for some input. Luckily I wondered what the 3 bugs in the module were about before I just happily used that code... So I ended up slightly modifying an implementation by Eli Bendersky, which already uses lists internally. So I left out the part about the comparator interface for now and just calculate standard WER, which is all I need right now.

I still need Windows for one piece of software that I use occasionally. So, since I've moved to Ubuntu, I've been using VMware for this (as it was the only solution at that time).

My VMware stopped working under Hardy. Luckily, I never needed my Windows-App for half a year. In Intrepid, I was able to just install vmware from their webpage and it restored my windows session from a year ago. Probably a record-breaking uptime for windows...

So, yesterday I played around with bootchart and found out, that the VMware-services took 4 precious seconds of my (and my battery's) lifetime on every boot. Not really worth it, as I'm unlikely to use my Windows-App anytime soon. So, here's what I did:

remove the links in /etc/rc*.d/*vmware

as the first command in /usr/bin/vmplayer add:

gksu -D "Need root priviledges to start vmware services." /etc/init.d/vmware restart

Works like a charm.