VER a year ago, I decided to spend a few hours of my vacation congragating and picking up school archives of mine, which were rather comprehensive. This time, for a change, I opted for digitisation of a lifetime of photographs, having already accumulated every recoverable paper archive in my possession. It is a project I have envisioned for myself over a year ago, in parallel to the aforementioned activity.

So, I took a large collection of albums and began scanning them by the page at the high resolution of 2552×3508 pixels. I then saved as highest quality JPEG‘s, which suffer from no visible ‘lossiness’. I am far from completion, having spent just a couple of days mechanically handling these albums. In the future I will begin by scanning albums of myself, then process the combined albums, siblings, parents, and finally grandparents and ancestors. Many days of work remain on the horizon. It may take years to cover the many decades of photography into digital form. It is like a housekeeping duty that compensate for a century of memories, which have been stored in a volatile and degrading form.

I finally have all my family pictures (baby pictures included) readily available on the hard-drives and I can make copies or burn CD-ROM‘s to relatives, shall I ever wish to do so. At some point, I could run overnight enhancement scripts to remove speckles, calibrate, slice, and balance the colours of all scans. Below is a sample page; one among 500+ page which I have scanned so far. It contains a few photos that remind me of simpler times.

I am more than pleased to share and show more baby photos. It is a simple cut-and-paste job, having completed all of these digitisation.

Click image for full size (warning: 1.3 MB JPEG)

A photo of a sign which I walk by every day

RIVING can be a time-occupying and risky errand, which under certain circumstances is unavoidable. I got my license at the legal age (which was 17) and have not been involved in any accidents.

At 18, as I finally started University, I chose to live in central places, which made driving (or let alone car ownership) an unnecessary ‘luxury’. Everywhere I needed to go was 15-minute walking distance at most (well, nearly everywhere I needed to attend got covered). This habit saved time and trouble such as maintenance (garage, washing, purchases), so I look back with no regrets.

I still drive a lot on vacations, usually with my parents’ cars. There are certain prohibition due to insurance costs, which is another deterrent that relates to ownership of any vehicle.

Google and Firefox are everywhere nowadays

Firefox news:

• Firefox downloads hit the 150-million mark
• Firefox developer takes Internet Explorer 7 (beta 2) for a spin

Google news:

• BMW banned by Google
• Dell-Google partnership

Computer maker Dell said Jan. 30 it has quietly begun testing a new partnership with Internet search provider Google.

Related item: Google Reward for Firefox Downloads

Attacking the competition using links

ERHAPS it is a case of stating the obvious, but this will be of interest to those Webmasters whose habit is to create directories with index.html therein. This approach often produces more elegant and graceful URL‘s, yet it may entail a hidden cost.

I believe I have identified an issue that badly affects my site and, in particular, its WordPress blog component. This certain deficiency is associated with links that point to a given page whose structure is artifically built using Apache’s mod_rewrite. Several URL’s can point at the same page (even without appending a question mark to pass extra file request arguments). It turns out that http://example.com/Example is different from http://example.com/Example/ (note the extra slash), as perceived by large engines. “Example” is assumed to be an object residing the main directory in the former case. In the latter case, it is definitely a directory, so a structural ambiguity does exist.

Apache redirections handle the two URL’s separately as well. If two inbound links are received (e.g. by creation in whichever sites), there is a chance for ambiguity, which then leads to duplication of pages. This means that pages might be penalised for duplicates in search engines’ cache. I begin to wonder if a vandal could maliciously point to ‘alias addresses’, thereby having pages duplicated in SE indices. In this way, the vandal could lead to penalties which are imposed on other sites — those Web sites where dirty tricks are believed to be employed. Such penalties do not involve the Webmaster, they cannot truly be avoided, but they can help someone knock down the competition in the SERP‘s.

DDOS attacks are another, totally separate matter because they can slow the Web server at worse circumstances, thus slowing down crawling and ruining a site’s profile. That aside, DDOS attacks are illegal and they require a lot of brute-force and excellent connectivity. Link creation does not.

Related item: Aftermath of a Zombie Attack

work on nostalgic memos quite frequently when I travel. I look back at my life, my childhood in particular. Certain memories are simply eroded as time goes by and the only way to preserve these memories is by writing permanent, detailed notes (or taking photos, videos and and the like).

The other possibility is to carry on living in the ‘adult world’, completely forgetting what cannot possibly contribute to the future, yet still represents an age of freedom and carelessness. Some memories are better left behind and forgotten, but without memory of one’s family and age of innocence, this riddance from invaluable memories is like throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Take a moment to remember; every now and then…

A pager which contains 8 virtual desktops

SSOCIATION of numbers with tasks can make life somewhat easier. Logical subdivision of processes can be reached in this way. Depending on the task at hand, a certain mnemonic can serve as a bridge to quick access. In this particular case, I am thinking about virtual desktops, which I have introduced and described before.

Let us consider a variety of activities which are undertaken in the daily routine of a computer user and assign each to a particular virtual desktop — a particular number, that is. This way, one can immediately jump from one process to another rather than ever launch and re-launch applications, or even minimise and restore any. Here are the mnemonic that I found to be most useful over time.

1. In my main workstation (University, dual-head as shown above):

• Desktop 1: Web browsing (occasionally feeds)
• Desktop 2: Right-hand-side: E-mail, left-hand-side: music
• Desktop 3: Reading (usually GhostView and file managers)
• Desktop 4: Programming
• Desktop 5: Writing/authoring
• Desktop 6: Remote connections (permanent link to two other workstations)
• Desktop 7: Photography, usually vacant or neglected
• Desktop 8: Communication, e.g. newsgroups

2+3. At work and at home:

Desktops 1 and 2 are consistent with the above. As the machines are not dual-head and only 4 virtual desktops are used (anything beyond 4 is often an excess), desktop 3 centralises many of the remote connection and file browsing aspects. Desktop 4 usually involves both reading and programming.

Either way, regardless of which numbers you assign to your favourite tasks, a quick tap on CTRL+number becomes natural and, given a certain task, the number makes transition to it more natural, almost innate. Diversion of attention can be made trivial and speed is then comparable with that of will. All programs are either in the visible (active) or virtual frame buffer.

Consider reading this intersting article on the role and impact of Firefox extensions. Below is the foreword.

If you have any doubts about the source of innovation in information technology, you should look at the Mozilla web site. I just counted 1,028 extensions contributed by the community. Then take a look at the themes section. Even the colossus of Redmond with its billions of dollars hasn’t mustered that kind of development effort for IE from its community over the years. Now, let’s get familiar with underlying reasons.

Related items on Firefox extensions:

• Firefox Essentials
• Firefox FTP Client
• Firefox for Web Design
• Favourite Firefox Extensions