Yahoo search results for “roy” with
thumbnails (previews) added ‘on the fly’

AST year (July 2005 to be precise), I conceived a hypermedia system/Web browser wherein page previews get put adjacent to incoming/outgoing links. Such previews should serve as somewhat of a screenshot that rids the need to explore deeper. They give the surfer a shallow preview, making arrival at pages more rhetoric or unneeded. The surfer can become selective based on the appearance of the destination page.

Screenshot-type extensions turn out to exist in Opera and even in Mozilla Firefox. In fact, there are several such extensions for Firefox. One of these extensions is BetterSearch, which manipulates search engine results pages directly. Thumbnail zooming is possible too and thumbnails rely on Alexa’s thumbnails database with the caveat that only front pages are displayed, rather than the actual pages delivered to the SERP. In BetterSearch, almost a dozen search engines are supported. One has to remember and constantly bear in mind that a fast connection is required for pragmatic use. It can otherwise become an obstruction — a time-consuming obstacle

More spam from more remote countries

nevitably, with higher bandwidth, more connected nodes, and little supervision (other than endless censorship), Chinese spam is gaining steam. That said, 80% of all spam was recently said to be despatched from compromised Windows computers, which makes this crime passive. As the BBC reports:

The US is close to losing its place as the top spam sending nation on Earth.

Statistics from security firm Sophos show that China is fast catching up the US as a source of junk e-mail.

The amount of spam on my sites has become too overwhelming recently. Certain accounts I will just filter blindly, without bothering to check any spam boxes for false positives. When it takes nearly an hour going through spam, it becomes both unacceptable and impractical.

My Wikis are repeatedly falling victims to Chinese spam and that’s just the beginning of the story, which involves much beyond E-mail. The Web becomes a scary place when much of its traffic is malignant. It becomes hostile, as opposed to user-friendly. It deters the use of E-mail, much as hacking forces some sites to go offline, due to high maintenance costs (time/money).

returned from a long vacation yesterday morning. It will take me a while to catch up with the workload and then resume a stable blogging pace. For the mean time, here are a couple photos from my stay at my cousin’s house in North Miami Beach.

A view on the yacht at sunset, taken from the garden

I am the person at the bottom. Not a good
photo, but I hadn’t much choice.

The conference in Virginia, by the way, turned out very well (for me, at least). Our work was overwhelmed by attention and, as it turned out a couple of days ago, it is likely to reach the world’s most formidable (in the good sense of the word) journal on medical imaging. It is work in progress, which joined two other in-progress submissions. Prospects are positive and the future seems bright.

Like many others, I prefer using my baby
picture as a personal blog/site identity

HEM….

This will be my last blog post for a while, the reason being absence. I am leaving for Easter later tonight (yes, well ahead of the holiday itself). Frankly, I am filled with anticipation. I am off to America where I shall present our medical imaging research in an international scenery for the first time. I will be back within a couple of weeks and I expect little or no ‘on-line time’ in the interim.

I dread the impact of spam whenever I’m oblivious to cyberspace and am almost aloof. Nevertheless, experience shows this to be beyond manageable. I suppose could, as a matter of principle, post some blogs items whilst I’m away. It would be slow and cumbersome though, so it beats the purpose.

I would like to wish a joyous holiday to all the regular and errand readers!

OMMERCIAL software advocates will often have you fooled. Industrial leaders (and their employees) will have you believe that “you always get what you paid for”. Poor products deliver bad results is the subtle implication. It is a fallacy, however, which keeps brainwashing the older generation more than anybody else. It ignores context, which in this case is software. It also relies on a gross generalisation of popular-yet-trite tidbits.

Many things are free nowadays. Even music is finally distributed for free, given generous bands that seek exposure and fame. “You get what you paid for”, you see, is an old proverbial saying, which treads back to an era that predates technology. It was conceived before software came into existence; before R&D investments were a principal factor of cost, let alone bandwidth or distribution through CD‘s.

Software is not physical. You need never manufacture 10 million ‘Apaches’ for all the different active Web sites. You need only make the code available for download, at which point it duplicates itself. This is why Unisys and Apache (among others like Oracle and IBM) falsify and shatter the long-term potential of commercial software. As a famous film once suggested (slanted quote), “when people have already built it, it will come”.

The Internet makes programs readily avaliable, which has lad to the gradual demise of shrink-wrapped software. Similarly, the Internet has had a negative/positive impact on journalism, depending on which side you are on. Small sites and independent ‘journalists’ (often bloggers) continue to obviate the need for the daily paper. Fear looms not only over Microsoft and The Wall Street Journal. Quieter, lower-profile vendors like Cisco are under threat too. Open Source communication protocols and routes, as well as VoIP and IPTV are in the making or already ‘in the wild’. In due time, they will expand and kill the industrial state-of-affair as we presently know it.

The notion of cost and independence from manufacturing extends further. Analogously, intellectual property has had value which was never truly physical. Software represents a different case altogether. When open, intellectual property or patents are out of the question (at least in the EU). Software can be duplicated and people realise that the prevalence of the Internet only gives a boost to a world-wide openness/freedom (freedom of choice, freedom to change, and free of charge): information-wise (let Wikipedia inspire you) and software-wise. Nobody can stop the customer’s demand, not even with DRM, which to many vendors was a last resort.

“You get what you paid for”, one says? Precisely so. For nothing at all you can get the world in our modern age.

have this sick habit, which is my tendency to keep track of bug reports I have submitted to projects. As uninteresting as it may be, here is my latest report to WordPress:

Leak’ Outside Bounding Border

[Latest nightly in use]

The appearance of the dashboard is inarguably impressive, so call it a pet peeve perhaps: I find the following box spillover somewhat of an eye sore, which should be trivial to fix. The “Write post” box is extended when the items on the left are expanded, but what about those the reside on the right-hand-side?

Local Screenshots

I sometimes feel like a bug report which is not recognised or awarded for (if not financially, then at least on a personal level), there is little or no incentive to intervene and assist further.

I must admit that I lost a fair bit of passion for WordPress development. I have been less willing to help once it began to drift onto a commercial agenda (Automattic). But as I digress, I may continue to contribute to a project whose code is GPL‘d; a project that has impact on many sites and enriches people’s on-line experience. I still feel discouraged to do more debugging when somebody else out there gets paid for it. The forum mavens have expressed similar sentiments before.

I thought that the following was very blog post-worthy…

How to fix your Windows Application when it doesn’t work:

  (1) Stop and start the program
   (2) Log in and log out again
    (3) Reboot the machine
     (4) Reinstall the application again
      (5) Reinstall the operating system
       (6) Dance naked around the machine, waving a rubber chicken
        (7) “Take your machine back for servicing”
            – Chris Wedgwood