Archive for the ‘Computers’ Category
You are currently browsing the archives for the Computers category.
12
May
2010
Boston.com Big Picture Cataloguer
I’m a big fan of The Boston Globe’s photojournalism series, The Big Picture. So much so, in fact, that I decided to dedicate a few hours this week to building a program that would not just download the entire series, but add caption metadata to each photo, since many are informative and look very nice in Picasa, for example.
Now, I’m happy that the application is stable enough to release to the world in the Code section of my website.
Since I don’t want people to be hammering The Boston Globe’s servers, I’ve made the script wait a fraction of a second between each request, and since I don’t want people to be able to disable this functionality, unfortunately only binaries will be available for the time being. Windows binaries are available already, OS X and Linux binaries to come in a few days.
Indeed, if those at The Boston Globe have a problem with how the program operates, they need simply contact me and we can come to an agreement, but I’ve worked hard to make sure that the program contacts their servers as little as possible.
Bug reports will be automatically submitted through this website too, but if you have any unforeseen problems (e.g. a crash or a hang), email me with as much information as possible (text describing the “Traceback” printed before the crash, what album/photo the program was working on, etc).
What can you do once you’ve got the entire 2GB collection of photos downloaded? Well, you can simply look through them at your own pace and comfort, or indeed choose to create a montage screensaver from them (although be warned – a screensaver that fades from a beautiful Antarctic landscape to a bloody photo of a victim of the war in Afghanistan might not be exactly what you had in mind.)
But in any event, hopefully it’ll be of some use. Enjoy!
25
Feb
2010
New discoveries
This was posted on reddit today. I agree entirely with the poster’s sentiment: interesting links on reddit are, more often than not, not links to the gateway of a whole website of interesting stuff. When they are links to a website’s front page, it’s generally a very narrow, single-purpose website that is quickly forgotten about. Hopefully, the poster’s subreddit — apparently yet to be made — will be a success.
In any event, having gone through the blog-post he had linked I decided to share some of my new discoveries here myself:
- Building Maker: A Google app I was unaware of, which lets you add the 3D element to Google Maps. For all bored architects out there (since this is just what they want to be doing in their time off.)
- Ikea Hacker: Neat stuff done with bog-standard Ikea furniture.
- Strange Maps: A blog of, well, old and interesting maps. I don’t know if I’d go as far as to say strange…
- Newseum: The front pages of newspapers from 78 countries around the world.
- Cooking For Engineers: This one reminded me of my father, a pragmatist who insists on weighing pasta before cooking it, in order to make sure he’ll be doling out the correct amount. Nothing wrong with approaching cooking as a science, as opposed to an art!
- GetHuman.com: An excellent idea for a website. This one tells you which keys you need to press in order to get an actual human operator on the line when calling a large company, saving you the time of listening to and trying to interact with a computerised system.
- PDFGeni.com: Another great idea — a repository of PDF documents such as old technical manuals, academic texts, and so on.
I feel I must write a disclaimer, saying I haven’t used or read these sites extensively, having just discovered them a few hours ago, but from first impressions they do look like they deserve a bookmark.
5
Jan
2010
Rette deine Freiheit
At the moment in Germany, there is fierce opposition growing against plans by the CDU to implement internet censorship under the guise of attacking the spread of child pornography. A movement championed by the German Piratenpartei has dubbed ex-minister for family affairs Ursula von der Leyen “Zensursula”, a portmandeau of Zensur (Censor) and Ursula, and is referring to the CDU’s plans as Stasi 2.0, a nod to the brutal secret police which operated in former East Germany.
Not only is there to be a secret list of blocked websites, such as exists in Australia, but the government is pushing for more data to be collected from citizens and retained for a long period of time.
A video which caught my attention a while back was entitled Du bist Terrorist (You are a terrorist). With soft ambient music playing, and deceptively pleasantly designed imagery, the two-minute video parodies the Du bist Deutschland ad-campaign with a soft, reassuring voice informing you of what the German government has in store for you, in terms of heavier and more invasive surveillance — because You are a terrorist.
Earlier this week I found that the same people had created a new video in the same vein, entitled Rette deine Freiheit (Save your freedom). The video focuses much more on the coming internet censorship in Germany than just data retention and physical surveillance.
Since there was no English translation available, I decided to translate it and re-upload to Youtube. The result is below:
The translation is by no means perfect, but at least it’s something. There were a few tricky problems with it:
- Einfach wegschauen: Literally “simply look away”, the video describes this as the method tried-and-tested by members of families with a history of domestic abuse. I was going to translate it as “simply look the other way” in its first instance, since this is the closest phrase in English that pertains to such a situation. However, this doesn’t exactly capture the double-meaning employed in the video, since it implies wilful ignorance which isn’t quite applicable to what the government is doing, so I decided to settle on “simply block it out”. I’m not sure I’m happy with this, however. Suggestions?
- In the sentence, “In Prävention, Therapie und Personal investiert hätte dies vielen Opfern helfen können: Reinste Verschwendung”, the meaning that is sarcastically implied is that the money that could be invested in preventative measures, therapy and personelle is much better spent on building an internet block. I don’t think I captured this very well.
In any event, there’s likely to be an official translation soon (I just saw an “Englisch (bald verfügbar)” notice at the top of the official page now — perhaps my emailing asking for a transcript of the video got them in a rush) and these issues will cease to be.
One last thing — if you are interested in learning more about the situation in Germany regarding internet freedom and the child pornography scare, I’d not only urge you to visit the links above, but also this shocking, but morbidly fascinating account of one techie’s work in the murkiest of subcultures. Thankfully, he doesn’t go into detail about actual child abuse, but instead details exactly how child pornography rings work, using the internet and computers.
Put simply, it proves what anyone with a clue already knows: current proposals for internet censorship will have absolutely no impact whatsoever on paedophiles and child pornographers and will only serve to infringe the rights of normal, law-abiding internet users.
Thanks to Áine and Patricia for help with one or two minor parts of the translation.
7
Oct
2009
Die Stimme des Klaviers
Peter Ablinger, an Austrian composer currently residing in Berlin, has done something rather interesting: he made a recording of a child reading the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court, then invented a mechanical piano player capable of reading notes in a very high time resolution from a computer.
The computer performs a frequency analysis of the sound spectrum, aided by Ablinger himself, which is then fed into the piano player and out comes the child’s voice.
<object width=”490″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/muCPjK4nGY4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><param name=”allowScriptAccess” value=”always”></param><embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/v/muCPjK4nGY4&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1″ type=”application/x-shockwave-flash” allowfullscreen=”true” allowScriptAccess=”always” width=”425″ height=”344″></embed></object>
(Video in German with English subtitles)
While I wouldn’t have much hope for people trying to work out what the piano is “saying” without the aid of seeing the words as they’re heard, I think it’s a pretty interesting experiment. The auto-player in itself is something to be marvelled at. Neat!
13
Jun
2009
The idea behind reCAPTCHA
An entertaining talk from Luis von Ahn, the guy behind CAPTCHAs, about the reinvention of the idea in a way to benefit mankind. Some pretty incredible statistics throughout, especially towards the end.
10
Jun
2009
The first few miliseconds of a HTTPS connection
Stumbled across this very detailed description of what exactly happens when a HTTPS connection is established between a client and server. It includes a well written, easy-to-read description of the mathematics behind RSA public key cryptography.
Worth the read!
21
May
2009
Windows Email Clients?
At the moment I’m looking to begin using a local email client on Windows again. I was going to use Mozilla’s Thunderbird, but it appears to be rather bloated, and apparently fails at finding emails when there’s a few thousand to search through.
What I need is something lightweight that treats email correspondances as conversations (a la Gmail) and can synchronise with web email services (Gmail, Zimbra, etc).
So, what should I use?
14
May
2009
A sneak peak at Wolfram|Alpha
There’s been a buzz about the internet in the past few months about Wolfram|Alpha, a “computational knowledge engine” announced in March. It’s been put together by Wolfram Research, the same people who came up with the Mathematica programming language and the project is headed up by English physicist Stephen Wolfram. It seems to be due to be released in 4 days, on the 18th of May, 2009. Today, a video was released demonstrating the power of the tool.
I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything in computer science or computational linguistics (question answering and information extraction are rather busy fields of research in CL) that’s impressed me so much. The sheer power, flexibility and ingenuity of the engine is indescribable.
The opportunities for computer scientists it will open up, once it’s released, are also endless. If the project can take the strain of its inevitable popularity and keep advancing at the current rate of development, I dare say it’ll be a definite watershed moment in the history of the internet.
