The Maths Tower (right), which is adjacent to Computer Science (left) and was recently demolished

ATER this evening I shall attend a lecture, which will be delivered by an honourable guest: Irving Wladawsky-Berger. It takes place immediately after my meeting with the Supervisor, who happens to head the Department.

I don’t go to public talks as regularly as I used, but it’s probably because it no longer is a must. Attendance is not mandatory and absence is rarely frowned upon. I sometimes look back at them days when I attended lectures and exams. I have no yearnings whatsoever. My bad and sporadic sleeping habits had me fall asleep in virtually any early lecture. Examination has proven to be no-one’s favourite either.

The last exam I took dates back to June 2003. I remember this date rather vividly because, rather than celebrating this milstones, I prepared for an job interview that I had scheduled for the following day. At that stage, I was not at all nervous about exam. A quick ’session’ involving Seinfeld episodes (I had all episodes on my hard-drive) become almost a must right before any exam, as a deliverer of light entertainment.

Either way, today I shall return to the Department of Computer Science to be part of what should be a fascinating presentation. As I slept 3 times today already, there is little or no chance of me falling asleep. Fingers crossed.

suppose that could have said that “I leave to go on holiday” or “take a vacation” this afternoon. To me, it does not feel as though these expressions would be suitable though. They bear a positive connotation. “Taking a break” sounds like a better fit, but experience suggests that information anxiety and Internet addiction will take their toll. This time (for a change) I promised myself to remain off-line until February.

I reluctantly look forward to my Easter break, but it seems like pressure will again be associated with presentation of our work. It will possibly supersede the joy of some sunny days with family in Florida. I am yet to discover if I can still enjoy vacations. I once committed myself to avoiding them if possible. It was a new year’s resolution even.

Previous breaks (pessimistic/melancholic):

• my past experiences
• Autumn Vacation

I tried not to offend anyone by choosing banners that make no direct mentioning of Christmas, only implicit (see below). Today, however, is the day for those of us who celebrate Christmas. Some will be enjoying the sweetest day of all, yet often it is also among the most boring days. Different stokes for different folks.

More holiday greetings:

• Text to Church Sign Convertor
• Holidays Site Banner

I will not be going on vacation this Christmas, even though I did last year. I wouldn’t describe a wintry vacation as one which is anywhere near optimal. Instead, I will take my vacation in late January when flights get cheaper. The fare somehow makes up for the desire (or lack thereof) to travel.

This month I will attend 4 formal Christmas events. As usual, this proves to be the most social time of the year, which happens to incorporate a diverse professional and recreational ‘hattery’. I will be going parties involving my following affiliations:

• IT Services
• Manchester Computing
• Health Club (Midland Hotel)
• Research Division (namely Imaging Science and Biomedical Engineering)

The parties are spread compfortably throughout the month of December. The celebration of Christmas, on its own right, will be quite costly this year. And yet, perhaps needless to mention, I very much look forward to it all.

Technical note: those who still use Internet Explorer (which is buggy) will have the tree rendered wrongly, position-wise. Version 6 still fails to cope with images alongside itemised lists (bulletpoints). Admittedly, I am through being kind and tolerant to Explorer bugs because they hinder Web development world-wide.

An appearance model of the brain after
perturbation has been applied to its training set

ATER today I will deliver an important presenation on my recent research work. This work has been done in collaboration with UCL for the past few months. This comes amidst 2 days of talks (the first day was yesterday), which slow down my activity on the Internet.

The presentation file that I practice with is in OpenOffice 1 format. This relates to my discussion on one-file presentations versus the more open and sparse (and in my opinion correct) form, as argued and published a couple of days ago. In-depth details on academic progress are periodically posted in MARS, which is a separate, research-related section that jointly resides on this domain.

Plenty of Web traffic and computer power drained in vain

OMBIE attacks on this site have persisted for over a month and have shown no sign of abatement. In fact, it only gets worse as more diverse locations get targetted for the puspose of referrer spam injection.

I have ultimately grown tired of these attacks rather than become accustomed to them. Each day, over 1,000 attacks are launched against my domain (2 of them actually) by hijacked Windows-powered machines. To remain kind to all genuine visitors, thus far I have re-directed suspicious page requests internally, displaying a forbidden (error 403) page. This has gotten me nowhere as the attackers are not deterred by any of this. Only more and more Windows computer get hijacked and ‘puppeteered’, so brute-force is never an issue.

Yesterday I became slightly more emotional and perhaps courageous enough to forward all of these leeches to microsoft.com/this-is-YOUR-zombie-NOT-mine. Let us wait and see how Microsoft handles nearly 50,000 of these zombie attacks per month. In my defence, all I do is merely pass on the zombies to the domain which I find responsible for their misfortunate existence. I look forward to some form of response from Microsoft with great anticipation.

A week back I enquired in nntp://uk.legal as to whether Microsoft could be held accountable directly for these attacks, which are due to major loopholes in their flagship O/S. Opinions which I received in response were mixed, but no doubt Microsoft’s faulty product, which allows computers to be used as weapons, ought to take at least part of the blame. I previously explained more on that stance of mine and arguments regarding liability.

Appearance model of the brain, ±2.5 standards deviations shown

T is difficult to submit a reasonably decent paper to an international conference. It is also rather unfortunate when two papers need to be completed before strict submission deadlines that are only one day apart.

I am planning to submit a paper on image registration assessment to ISBI 2006 and another on appearance model evaluation to CVPR 2006. Both deadlines have been set to the beginning of next week. That possibly, if not probably, warrants scarce blog activity. Both conferences will take place in the States and I will wind up attending at least one of the conferences.

As the documents adhere to IEEE-styled templates, I have finally descended to the level of raw L^AT_EX. I preferred to have avoided it for the past 4 years as I discovered the front-end L_yX, which has its pros and cons. L^AT_EX. feels like a step back nonetheless as failed attempts to compile a document are time-consuming. This is just one among the many deficiencies I could list.