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Research Presentation

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

LATER 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.

Zombies Go Back Home

Ethernet
Plenty of Web traffic and computer power drained in vain

ZOMBIE 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.

Tight Deadlines

First mode of an appearance model of the brain

Appearance model of the brain, ±2.5 standards deviations shown

IT 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 LATEX. I preferred to have avoided it for the past 4 years as I discovered the front-end LyX, which has its pros and cons. LATEX. 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.

Supercomputing and Medical Imaging

THIS item is about my personal research and, in particular, its recent development and progression, which may take it in a different and exciting direction. I currently work on assessment of registration algorithms, which I have described in some depth over at MARS — my research-related publishing platform. The latest item discusses everything at a more technical level.

Below lies the diagram which describes a possible framework, which is still at its ‘propsal stage’. The ultimate aim is to provide an e-Science workbench for medical image analysis. My experiments account for a mere subset, where image/volume sequences need be aligned.

Registration framework
Click image for full-sized version

Second SuSE Machine

SOME time ago I mentioned the three Linux machines which I have accumulated, but this situation has changed due to a miserable hard-drive crash. I received a new (and slightly better) machine as a replacement yesterday. Rather than having 2 Ubuntu boxes and 1 SuSE box, it is now 2 for SuSE and only one for Ubuntu.

The main motive for this shift was a video card incompatibility, but I also must confess that I do not like GNOME as much as I like KDE. Moreover, SuSE is a more comprehensive and self-contained distribution where fewer installation tasks need to be completed once the operating system has been set up.

SuSE screenshot

Arbitrary screenshot of my SuSE Linux box at work

SuSE, which comes from Novell, has become one of the market leaders as far as Linux in the enterprise is concerned. Novell are among the most prolific vendors of Linux as they incorporate merely any modern desktop environment. When I installed SuSE on the new machine yesterday, I received the re-assurance that Novell, much like Canonical (makers of Ubuntu), simply understand usability, as well as the need for a friendly UI and stability. Therefore, they are bound to flourish at the expense of more ‘stubborn’ distributions, which often pose challenges rather than assist the user and adhere to abstraction. Their support and community are quite strong as well.

Ubuntu, on the other hand, continues to have a few weaknesses, so I will continue to favour and evangelise SuSE whenever I get the chance. I must stress that Ubuntu is an excellent distribution for beginners and it also boasts excellent hardware detection so it involves little or no gamble. Its accompanying Live CD gives further reassurance too.

Autumn Vacation

Spring vacation

LATER this morning I shall be leaving for a 10-day vacation. I will attempt to continue adding content to my blog, though pace will not be comparable with my usual. As I will be getting less input (i.e. reading and conversing), I don’t expect myself to have much to say either.

Shown above is a photo from my last vacation in springtime. A few transformations were applied to the image using the excellent GIMP, just for amusement. Knowing my past experiences, this vacation will only lead to accumulation of work and reslessness. Internet is an addiction to me.

Public Speaking

Data Recovery - presentation

THIS Wednesday I will deliver a talk to an audience of surgeons at the Royal Eye Hospital. The two short presentations gracefully run under Firefox and focus on computer security and data recovery, which are not my primary fields of expertise. Nonetheless, there is plenty of information to deliver on the subject as it is broad and open-ended. As usual, my presentations are publicised on-line (not finalised yet):

Please do remember that both presentation were composed with a non-technical audience in mind. They do not bog down to a low level of granularity and tend to refer to Windows more often than to other platforms, which I shall not neglect to advocate. It is by no means propaganda, but I hope to get across the message that Windows (and several applications including IE) is prone to failure and woe.

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