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Archive for April, 2005

PimpZilla Blue

PimpZilla for Mozilla Firefox is one of the richest themes around. It was too ‘bling-bling’ and yellow for me to use at the office, so I modified it slightly. I can imagine the feeling of the original author about the hack, therefore I do not publish it. Contact me if you want a copy however.

PimpZilla Blue

PimpZilla in blue contains the official PimpZilla screenshot
click image to view in full size

Update: To avoid an E-mail load, I have put the Java archive in this page.

Congested Workspace and the GIMP

Faces in GIMP

To test my algorithm for a paper (see related work), I needed to generate warped face images (approximately 300 of them) and found myself with a well-occupied workspace. I use the GIMP animation Script FU called “Ripple” to achieve the necessary effects. The script takes an input image and outputs a sequence of images which make up a video of a ripple effect, like a flag.

Example input:

Ripple before

One image of a sequence of outputs:

Ripple after

Thank you, Adam D. Moss, for sharing that excellent script.

Local or Web-based E-mail

Mail boxes

A large number of users migrate from local mail store and private accounts (often provided by their ISP) to on-line E-mail services such as GMail. The two different mail management paradigms suit different people, though here are some factors to consider:

Web-based (e.g. Yahoo, Gmail) Local (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird)
Powerful search facilities Google Desktop under Windows
Requires live connection to access Can manage mail off-line
Accessible from anywhere With popping disabled (or IMAP), accessible from anywhere
Saves local storage Space-consuming
Limited storage volume Storage volume almost unbounded
Arduous back-up process Simple to back up
Slow interaction faster interaction
Less secure (e.g. cache, packet sniffing) relatively secure

Experience has taught me that it is ‘healthy’ to combine both, but “different strokes for different folks”.

Randomly-Generated Publication

MIAS-IRC AbstractOne of the more amusing stories from Slashdot talks about an academic paper in computer science, which was accepted to be presented at a conference. The catch: all text, figures and references were randomly-generated and are completely incoherent (see Web site). Will a randomly-generated talk be delivered as the guys at MIT promise?

Lost in the City

I have continously come across a couple of ducks that somehow found their way to the centre of Manchester. Today I dared to approach and take a picture — one of the 20 pictures that I take every day.

Ducks

Single and Double Quotes

Quotes

Each and every one of us writes and we all use quotes and apostrophes on occasions. Terrible it is to see how often they are chosen wrongly, or even worse, at random.

TECHWR-L provided me with a long-sought answer. It also revealed that I was using the British style without being aware of it. Statements require double quotes, scare quotes have a single. Have a read to get a short lesson in punctuation.

…I’d suggest British English generally uses double quotes for speech (“Let’s go to the beach,” Jane suggested) but single quotes for things like scare quotes (‘respected’ news sites)…

Talks and Publications

I will apparently deliver a talk at University College London next week. Here is a gist of my current research work:

We are given a collection of raw images depicting an object such as the brain. We then construct a model which can produce synthetic images as shown below.

First mode of an appearance model of the brain

We developed a framework that can quantitatively evaluate such models, having constructed them automatically. For more details, see a previous entry on the subject or confer my research pages.

This work has recently been accepted for presentation in IPMI, which will be hosted in Colorado. I currently work on papers for MICCAI (due later tonight) in Palm Springs, California and BMVC in Oxford.

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Original styles created by Ian Main (all acknowledgements) • PHP scripts and styles later modified by Roy Schestowitz • Help yourself to a GPL'd copy
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